The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education 1138338516, 9781138338517, 9780429441677

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THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF RESEARCH ON DIALOGIC EDUCATION

The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education provides a comprehensive overview of the main ideas and themes that make up the exciting and diverse field of Dialogic Education. With contributions from the world’s leading researchers, it describes underpinning theoretical approaches, debates, methodologies, evidence of impact, how Dialogic Education relates to different areas of the curriculum and ways in which work in this field responds to the profound educational challenges of our time. The handbook is divided into seven sections, covering: •• •• •• •• •• •• ••

The theory of Dialogic education Classroom dialogue Dialogue, teachers and professional development Dialogic education for literacy and language Dialogic education and digital technology Dialogic education in science and mathematics Dialogic education for transformative purposes

Expertly written and researched, the handbook marks the coming of age of Dialogic Education as an important and distinctive area of applied educational research. Featuring chapters from authors working in different educational contexts around the world, the handbook is of international relevance and provides an invaluable resource for researchers and students concerned with the study of educational dialogue and allied areas of socio-cultural research. It will interest students on PhD programmes in Education Faculties, Master’s level courses in Education and postgraduate teacher-training courses. The accounts of results achieved by high-impact research projects around the world will also be very valuable for policy makers and practitioners. Neil Mercer is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, where he is also the Director of Oracy Cambridge: the Hughes Hall Centre for Effective Spoken Communication and a Life Fellow of the college Hughes Hall. Rupert Wegerif is Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge where he co-leads the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research (CEDiR) Group. Louis Major is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge interested in the role of technology in supporting educational dialogue and interaction.

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THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF RESEARCH ON DIALOGIC EDUCATION

Edited by Neil Mercer, Rupert Wegerif and Louis Major

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Neil Mercer, Rupert Wegerif and Louis Major; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Neil Mercer, Rupert Wegerif and Louis Major to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mercer, Neil, editor. | Wegerif, Rupert, 1959- editor. | Major, Louis, (Louis Christopher), 1985- editor. Title: The Routledge international handbook of research on dialogic education / edited by Neil Mercer, Rupert Wegerif and Louis Major. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. Identifiers: LCCN 2019020961 (print) | LCCN 2019981399 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138338517 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429441677 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Communication in education. | Teacher-student relationships. Classification: LCC LB1033.5 .R69 2020 (print) | LCC LB1033.5 (ebook) | DDC 371.102/2–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020961 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019981399 ISBN: 978-1-138-33851-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44167-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

CONTENTS

List of figures List of tables  List of editors  List of contributors 

xi xiii xv xvi

Introduction to the Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education  Rupert Wegerif, Neil Mercer and Louis Major 

1

SECTION I

The theory of dialogic education 

9

Introduction to the theory of dialogic education  Rupert Wegerif 

11

1 Towards a dialogic theory of education for the Internet Age  Rupert Wegerif 

14

2 Dialogism and education  David Skidmore 

27

3 Who’s talking? (and what does it mean for ‘us’?): Provocations for beyond Humanist dialogic pedagogies  Kim Davies and Peter Renshaw 

v

38

Contents

4 Educational processes and dialogical construction of Self  Giuseppina Marsico, Luca Tateo, Ramon Cerqueira Gomes and Virgínia Dazzani 

50

5 Linguistic ethnographic analysis of classroom dialogue  Adam Lefstein and Julia Snell 

63

6 Collaborative argumentation-based learning  Michael J. Baker, Jerry Andriessen and Baruch B. Schwarz 

76

7 Learning, discursive faultiness and dialogic engagement  Anna Sfard 

89

8 Dialogic educational approaches in Ibero-American countries: A systematic mapping review  Juan Manuel Fernández-Cárdenas and Sergio Reyes-Angona 

100

SECTION II

Classroom dialogue 

119

Classroom dialogue  Paul Warwick and Victoria Cook 

121

9 Metatalk for a dialogic turn in the first years of schooling  Christine Edwards-Groves and Christina Davidson 

125

10 Embedding a dialogic pedagogy in the classroom: What is the research telling us?  Frank Hardman  11 Analysing student talk moves in whole-class teaching  Jan Hardman 

139

152

12 Visual learning analytics to support classroom discourse analysis for teacher professional learning and development  Gaowei Chen 

167

13 Classroom dialogue and student attainment: Distinct roles for teacher-led and small-group interaction?  Christine Howe, Sara Hennessy and Neil Mercer 

182

14 Distinctively democratic discourse in classrooms  Susan Jean Mayer, Catherine O’Connor, and Adam Lefstein  vi

196

Contents SECTION III

Dialogue, teachers and professional development  Dialogue, teachers and professional development  Riikka Hofmann  15 Teachers’ collaborative dialogues in contexts of Lesson Study  Peter Dudley and Maria Vrikki 

211 213 217

16 How dialogic teachers create the dialogic classroom: Lessons from Japanese teachers  Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

227

17 Teacher professional development to support classroom dialogue: Challenges and promises  Sara Hennessy and Maree Davies 

238

18 Designing professional development to support teachers’ facilitation of argumentation  Alina Reznitskaya and Ian A. G.Wilkinson 

254

19 Attitudes towards dialogic teaching and the choice to teach: The role of preservice teachers’ perceptions on their own school experience  Alexander Gröschner, Miriam F. Jähne and Susi Klaß 

269

SECTION IV

Dialogic education for literacy and language  Section introduction: Dialogic education for literacy and language  Fiona Maine 

287 289

20 Oracy education: The development of young people’s spoken language skills  292 Neil Mercer, James Mannion and Paul Warwick  21 A dialogic approach to understanding and promoting literacy practices in the primary classroom  Sylvia Rojas-Drummond  22 Dialogue-intensive pedagogies for promoting literate thinking  Ian A. G.Wilkinson, Anna O. Soter, P. Karen Murphy and Sarah C. Lightner  23 Reading as a transaction of meaning making: Exploring the dialogic space between texts and readers  Fiona Maine  vii

306 320

336

Contents

24 Research on dialogic literary gatherings  Marta Soler-Gallart  25 Writing talk: Developing metalinguistic understanding through dialogic teaching  Debra Myhill and Ruth Newman  26 Mapping the terrain of dialogic literacy pedagogies  Maren Aukerman and Maureen Boyd 

348

360 373

SECTION V

Dialogic education and digital technology  Section introduction: Dialogic education and digital technology  Simon Knight 

387 389

27 Affordances for dialogue: The role of digital technology in supporting productive classroom talk  Louis Major and Paul Warwick 

394

28 Establishing and maintaining joint attention in classroom dialogues: Digital technology, microblogging and ground rules  Ingvill Rasmussen, Anja Amundrud and Sten Ludvigsen 

411

29 Designing a dialogic technology-enhanced pedagogy to support collaborative creativity  Manoli Pifarré 

425

30 Researching the materiality of communication in an educational makerspace: The meaning of social objects  Kristiina Kumpulainen, Antti Rajala and Anu Kajamaa 

439

31 The polyphonic model of collaborative learning  Stefan Trausan-Matu 

454

32 Progressive dialogue in computer-supported collaborative knowledge building  Carol K. K. Chan,Yuyao Tong and Jan van Aalst 

469

33 Democratization and education: Conditions and technology for dialogic transformative political education  Benzi Slakmon and Baruch B. Schwarz 

485

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Contents

34 Pedagogical link-making with digital technology in science classrooms: New perspectives on connected learning  Judith Kleine Staarman and Jaume Ametller  35 Triangulating identity, groups and objects: A university case  M. Beatrice Ligorio, Francesca Amenduni and Katherine McLay 

497

509

SECTION VI

Dialogic education in science and mathematics 

525



527

Dialogic education in science and mathematics  Jaume Ametller 

36 The details matter in mathematics classroom dialogue  Noreen M.Webb, Megan L. Franke, Marsha Ing, Nicholas C. Johnson and Joy Zimmerman 

530

37 The role of dialogue in science epistemic practices  Aik-Ling Tan and Kok Sing Tang 

547

38 The future of dialogic education: An opportunity and a challenge  Lauren B. Resnick, Melissa E. Libertus and Faith Schantz 

559

39 Dialogic thinking together towards abstract reasoning  Paul Webb 

570

40 Dialogue and shared cognition: An examination of student–student talk in the negotiation of mathematical meaning during collaborative problem solving  David Clarke and Man Ching Esther Chan 

581

SECTION VII

Dialogic education for transformative purposes 

593



595

Dialogic education for transformative purposes  Farah Ahmed and Hilary Cremin 

41 Interactions and dialogue in Education: Dialogical tensions as resources or obstacles  Michèle Grossen and Nathalie Muller Mirza 

ix

597

Contents

42 Understanding conflict transformation dialogue through coding based on Buber and Rogers  Toshiyasu Tsuruhara and Hilary Cremin 

610

43 Creating an ‘ethic of care’ in a vertical tutor group: Addressing students’ challenges through dialogue  Rupert Higham and Hans De Vynck 

622

44 The power of a dialogical framework to articulate collaborative learning in the 21st century  Yifat Ben-David Kolikant and Sarah Pollack 

634

45 The potential of halaqah to be a transformative Islamic dialogic pedagogy  Farah Ahmed  46 Exploring the impact of Interactive Groups: Dialogic interactions involving families and community members  Ramon Flecha  47 Dialogic pedagogy in a post-truth world  Robin Alexander 

647

660 672

Index687

x

FIGURES

  2.1 The sphere of dialogue 28   4.1 Educational intervention in function of a value-laden imagined child 54   4.2 The construction and elaboration of Educational Self 57   4.3 The configuration of I-positions activated and the enhanced exotopy in the inverted flux (from periphery to center) of semiotic movement 59   8.1 Geographical distribution map of publications in the area of dialogic education105   8.2 Number of articles and citations by dimension 106 12.1 A screenshot of the CDA’s bubble visualization 174 15.1 Research Lesson Study process  219 16.1 Triadic relationship in Saitou pedagogy 230 20.1 The Cambridge Oracy Skills Framework 296 24.1 Process of dialogic reading, adpated from Soler 352 27.1 Connecting Action Possibilities (APs) and Enacted Affordances 401 28.1 This figure represents teacher–researcher collaboration over one year 415 28.2 Transitions in technology-rich classrooms 416 28.3 Advice on how to follow ground rules 417 29.1 Graphical representation of the educational dimensions and components of the proposed dialogic technology-enhanced pedagogy for collaborative creativity 431 29.2 Representation and description of the phases and tasks developed during the interdisciplinary project 434 29.3 Multimodal representation and evaluation of shared ideas in the classroom project 435 30.1 Students working on the FUSE Studio maker challenges 443 30.2 3D printer as a magic machine 447 31.1 Excerpt of a homework chat session 456 31.2 Candidates for voices 459 xi

Figures

31.3 The explicit referencing facility 31.4 Divergences and convergences 31.5 Interanimation among voices “reply”, “topic” and “(re)presentation” 31.6 A comparative visualization of the evolution of voices in two chats, done with PolyCAFe 31.7 A comparative representation of the evolution of collaboration computed with ReaderBench 32.1 Features of Knowledge Forum supporting progressive dialogue  34.1 Differentiated use (present information vs. build/edit information) of white boards 35.1 Occurrence analyses – macro categories position in M1 and M2 35.2 Occurrence analyses – macro categories position in ForumCommunity and LinkedIn 36.1 Percentage of lessons in which each student (on average) exhibited high-level participation in dialogic interaction 36.2 Percentage of lessons in which the student exhibited high-level participation in dialogic interaction 40.1 Writing by Anna 40.2 The written solution of Audrey and Katie 43.1 The Cam-UNAM Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis 46.1 Students’ performance in standardised tests in the Mediterrani school

xii

460 463 464 464 465 473 504 514 515 537 539 586 587 628 666

TABLES

  2.1 Dialogicality of pedagogy 30   5.1 Contrasting the episode with a national sample vis-à-vis occurrences of discourse moves associated with dialogic pedagogy 70   7.1 Properties of ontic and deontic discourses 94   7.2 Two examples of dyadic peer interactions 96   7.3 The relation between different levels of discursive learning and conversation 97   8.1 Research questions of the systematic mapping review 103   8.2 Emerging dimensions in the process of keywording in the area of dialogic education 107   8.3 The 16 most cited articles of mapping and their thematic areas 108 11.1 Dialogic model of classroom discourse 155 11.2 Coding framework for student talk at the level of R-move 156 11.3 Coding framework for act types making up extended student contributions 157 11.4 Mathematics 160 11.5 English 161 11.6 Science 161 11.7 Sub-types of extended student contributions in English, mathematics and science 163 13.1 Mean attainment scores across classrooms 186 13.2 Indices of dialogicality 188 13.3 Quality of group work scales 190 15.1  Excerpt223 18.1 Overview of Year 3 professional development programme 259 18.2 Overview of the Argumentation Rating Tool 260 19.1 Descriptive statistics and factor loadings of the final EFA- and CFA-models of the ADT-S 276 xiii

Tables

19.2 Zero-order and partial correlations of the ADT-S subscales and career choice motivation, with influence of the school teacher on career/ subject choice as explanatory variables 19.3 Descriptive statistics and results of nonparametric group-comparisons for the school teacher profiles 22.1 Nine identified approaches to discussion around text 22.2 Characterization of discussion approaches by parameter based on coding 22.3 Mean ratings of stances and authorial intention by student raters and discussion approach 22.4 Ratings of who has control of topic and interpretive authority by student raters and discussion approach 25.1 The rhetorical effect of moving adverbials in a sentence 25.2 Adapted from Halliday 27.1 The nine ‘affordance’ sub-themes identified by the scoping review 27.2 Talkwall’s seven ‘enacted affordances’ for dialogue 32.1 KB principles, technology affordances and dialogic pedagogy for progressive dialogue 35.1 Grid of positioning categories 36.1 Examples of students explaining their own ideas: two levels of detail 36.2 Examples of students engaging with others’ ideas: two levels of detail 42.1 Coding scheme for students 42.2 Coding scheme for the facilitator 42.3 An example of coded dialogue 42.4 Numerical summary of the ‘Elicitive’ code 42.5 Numerical summary of the ‘Open’ and ‘Expansive’ codes, followed by ‘Elicitive’ or ‘Empathetic’ codes 42.6 An example of elicitive facilitation 42.7 An example of judgmental facilitation 45.1 Research halaqah key questions 45.2 Participants’ details 45.3 Principles of dialogic teaching 45.4 Thematic analysis frequency chart: halaqah as transformative Islamic dialogic pedagogy for developing shakhsiyah 46.1 Summary of the studies on Interactive Groups

xiv

278 280 322 325 327 329 362 366 399 404 476 513 535 536 614 615 616 617 618 619 619 650 651 651 652 667

EDITORS

Neil Mercer is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, Director of Oracy Cambridge: The Centre for Effective Spoken Communication and a Life Fellow of the college Hughes Hall. His research concerns the development of children’s spoken language and reasoning abilities and teachers’ role in that development. Rupert Wegerif is Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge where his research focuses on education for dialogue in the context of the Internet Age. He is co-lead of the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research Group (CEDiR). Louis Major is a Senior Research Associate at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on digital technology’s role in the future of education, in ­particular, how technology can support educational dialogue and interaction.

xv

CONTRIBUTORS

Jan van Aalst is a Visiting Scholar in the Faculty of Behavioral, Management and Social Sciences, University of Twente, and Co-editor in Chief of Journal of the Learning Sciences. His research focuses on pedagogical designs and students’ self-directed reflective assessment in knowledge building in secondary schools. Farah Ahmed is a co-convener of the Intercultural and Conflict-transformation Dialogue strand of the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research Group. She has expertise in holistic character education and dialogic pedagogies within Islamic contexts and is Director of Education and Research at Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation, where she works on research, curriculum development and teacher education. Robin Alexander is Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, and Professor of Education Emeritus, University of Warwick. His research explores policy, pedagogy, culture, primary schooling, comparative and development education, with classroom talk a prominent subset culminating to date in the successful large-scale trial of his framework for dialogic teaching. Francesca Amenduni is a PhD student in Experimental Pedagogy. Her expertise is in the e-learning field both as practitioner and researcher. She has worked as an e-learning tutor and instructional designer since 2015. She has carried out research related to blended learning, and her current PhD project examines semi-automated assessment of Critical Thinking in e-learning forums. Jaume Ametller is a Serra Húnter Associate Professor of science education at the University of Girona. He is interested in the design of teaching sequences and materials, in the role of communication in the construction of knowledge and in how theory informs our understanding of how people learn. Anja Amundrud is a doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Education, University of Oslo. She has a background as a primary school teacher, and her PhD research focus is on teaching and learning with new technologies. Amundrud is also interested in the design and development of digital resources. Jerry Andriessen is an Independent Senior Researcher (PhD Utrecht University), with more than 150 scientific publications on children’s writing, collaborative learning, ICT in educaxvi

Contributors

tion and arguing to learn. His current research focuses on the role of teachers as moderators of meaningful interaction. Maren Aukerman is a Researcher who focuses on how students make meaning from text in conversation with others and how teachers can better facilitate talk that highlights student voices and perspectives. Her research has been honoured with the Albert J. Harris Award and the Dina Feitelson Award from the International Literacy Association. Michael J. Baker is a tenured Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Research Director, working in the Social and Economics Sciences department of the French National Graduate Telecommunications Engineering School (Telecom ParisTech).Within psychology and linguistics, his work focuses on the analysis of argumentative interactions produced in epistemic situations. Maureen Boyd is a Researcher who analyses classroom talk patterns across time to better understand the roles, functions and impact of teacher and student talk on teaching and learning. She has a special interest in questioning, response-able talk practices and what a dialogic stance to teaching and learning can look like in our classrooms. Carol K. K. Chan is a Professor in the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong. Her research area is in Learning Sciences with a focus on computer-supported knowledge building. She is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. Man Ching Esther Chan is a Research Fellow in the International Centre for Classroom Research (ICCR) at the University of Melbourne. She is a registered psychologist who specialises in educational psychology and assessment. Her research interest is in the knowledge construction process involved in student learning, teaching and research. Gaowei Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD in educational psychology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include computer-supported collaborative learning, classroom dialogue, dialogic instruction, technology-supported teacher professional development and learning analytics David Clarke is a Professor at the International Centre for Classroom Research (ICCR), the University of Melbourne. Over the last 20 years, his research activity has centred on capturing the complexity of classroom practice through a programme of international video-based classroom research. Victoria Cook is a Research Associate at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on dialogue and technology in teaching and learning. Hilary Cremin is a Reader at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She researches and teaches peacebuilding, in and through education, in settings in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Her latest book, with Terence Bevington, is Positive Peace in Schools: Tackling Conflict and Creating a Culture of Peace in the Classroom, published by Routledge. Christina Davidson is a Senior Lecturer (Literacy Studies) at Charles Sturt University, Australia. She is a conversation analyst whose research focuses on children’s social interactions in school classrooms, preschools and homes. She is co-editor of Digital Childhoods (Springer 2017) and has authored numerous articles on transcription in research. Kim Davies is a Lecturer in the School of Education at Deakin University,Australia, having previously worked as a teacher educator at Monash University and the University of Queensland.

xvii

Contributors

She is concerned with the sociocultural politics of schooling, and her teaching and research focus on critical engagement with theories and practices of ‘difference’, ‘diversity’, ‘disability’ and ‘inclusion’ and their implications for educational policies and teaching practices. Maree Davies is a Researcher who has conducted three major research projects in the area of critical thinking and dialogue. She is interested in research that involves examining effective pedagogy, in particular motivation and engagement of adolescents, self-regulation of adolescents and examining pedagogy that promotes critical thinking for adolescents, particularly through face-to-face dialogue. Virgínia Dazzani is Professor of Graduate Programs in Psychology and Education at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. She is a member of the Basic and Scientific Advisory Boards as well as the Technological Assessment Board in the area of Humanities and Education since March 2013. She is the author of Rorty and Education (2010), published by Authentic, and coeditor of Student Graduate Studies: concepts and methodological possibilities in program evaluation (2012), published by EDUFBA. Hans De Vynck is a science teacher. He completed an MEd at Cambridge University in 2016, with a focus on developing student agency through dialogue and an ethic of care, and an emphasis on improved relations with students. This remains the focus of his teaching practice. Peter Dudley is a promoter of dialogic education and collaborative learning, which he has done for 30 years. He introduced Lesson Study to the UK in 2003 and has studied and published on its power to create meaning-oriented teacher learning through exploratory talk between teachers alongside dialogic forms of student learning that are visible, audible and enhance progress. Christine Edwards-Groves is Associate Professor (Literacy Studies) at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Her research focuses on dialogic pedagogies and professional learning. With Christina Davidson, she was lead investigator in the inaugural nationally funded research (PETAA), published in Becoming a meaning maker:Talk and interaction in the dialogic classroom (2017). Juan Manuel Fernández-Cárdenas is Professor of Education at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico. He has led several research projects and has published more than 75 research articles, refereed chapters and books. His research interests include the conformation of communities of practice mediated by the use of digital technology, in particular in STEM education. Ramon Flecha is Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona, Doctor Honoris Causa from West University of Timişoara. He was Chair of the Expert Group on Evaluation Methodologies for the Interim and Ex-post evaluations of H2020 and main researcher of INCLUD-ED (FP6, EC) and IMPACT-EV (FP7, EC). Megan L. Franke is a Professor of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on supporting teacher learning for both pre- and in-service teachers, diversity in mathematics education, leadership in urban low performing schools and Cognitively Guided Instruction. Ramon Cerqueira Gomes is an educational and school psychologist at the Federal Bahian Institute of education, science and technology where he works with teenagers and young people. He received his PhD in Developmental Psychology from the Federal University of Bahia. His research expertise in educational psychology is in the relationship between school span and student self-development. xviii

Contributors

Alexander Gröschner is Full Professor and Chair for Research on Teaching and Learning at the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, which he has been since 2016. He studied Communication, Educational and Political Science (MA). He received his PhD in Educational Psychology in 2008, and his venia legendi from Technical University of Munich (TUM) in 2014. His research focuses on teacher–student interaction, video-based teacher learning and practice-based teacher education. Michèle Grossen is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). Drawing on a sociocultural and dialogical approach to thinking and learning, her research focuses on interactional and discourse processes in learning situations and other institutional situations. Recently, her research aims at developing a sociocultural psychology of ageing. Frank Hardman is employed and has worked extensively in the field of education and international development focusing on system-level reforms to teacher education. Central to his work has been the monitoring and evaluation of what takes place at the school and classroom level as a key indicator of the quality of education provision. Jan Hardman is Associate Professor in Language Education in the Department of Education at the University of York, UK. Her research focuses on classroom interaction, discourse analysis, dialogic pedagogy and teacher education across all phases of education. She has worked on a range of international research projects and published widely on dialogic pedagogy and teacher professional development. Sara Hennessy is Reader in Teacher Development and Pedagogical Innovation in the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education. She is co-founder of the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research Group (CEDiR) (http://bit.ly/cedirgroup). Her research on classroom dialogue focuses on technology mediation, teacher professional development and analytic schemes for assessing quality. Rupert Higham is a Lecturer in Educational Leadership at UCL Institute of Education, where he leads the Applied Educational Leadership MA. His research and teaching is in values-led school improvement, educational dialogue and developing responsible leadership. He researches the use of the Index for Inclusion and democratic practice in schools. Riikka Hofmann is a University Lecturer at the University of Cambridge where she leads the research strand “Dialogue, Professional Change and Leadership” within the Cambridge Educational Dialogue Research Group (CEDiR). Her research investigates sustainable professional change in schools, hospitals and higher education, with a particular focus on professional dialogues. Christine Howe is Professor of Education (Emerita) at the University of Cambridge. Her research lies at the intersection of psychology, education and linguistics, with major interests including children’s communicative, linguistic and peer relational skills, children’s reasoning in science and mathematics, and dialogue and learning during peer collaboration and teacher-led instruction. Marsha Ing is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. She studies measurement and assessment and teaches courses on research methods, statistics and measurement. Miriam F. Jähne is a Research Assistant at the Chair for Teaching and Learning at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. She graduated in Psychology in Magdeburg and Jena. Her research xix

Contributors

focuses on the professional development of teachers and methods of empirical research in teaching and learning. Nicholas C. Johnson is a Senior Researcher in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research investigates the transformative possibilities of learning and teaching that centres children’s mathematical thinking. Anu Kajamaa is an Associate Professor and a research group co-leader at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki. She is an expert in sociocultural and practicebased theories, qualitative methods and participatory intervention techniques. Her current research focuses on children’s learning, development and creativity in school-based makerspaces. Susi Klaß is Senior Researcher at the Chair for Teaching and Learning at the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena. After studying Media and Educational Science at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, she received her PhD at the Friedrich-Alexander University of ErlangenNürnberg. Her research focuses on online-based learning in higher education. Simon Knight is a Lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Transdisciplinary Innovation. His research and teaching focus on the ways that people use evidence in decision making and the role of technologies and dialogue in those processes. Yifat Ben-David Kolikant is an Associate Professor in the Seymor Fox School of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests are the inter-relations among technology, schooling and learning, particularly the impact of students’ informal experience with technology on learning and the characterisation of effective teaching environments in the 21st century. Kristiina Kumpulainen is Professor and Vice Dean for research at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University Helsinki. Her ongoing research projects include Learning by making: The educational potential of school-based makerspaces for young learners’ digital competencies, funded by the Academy of Finland and the Joy of Learning Multiliteracies, funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. Adam Lefstein is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Education at the BenGurion University of the Negev in Israel. His current research studies investigate teacher professional discourse and learning; large-scale development of dialogic pedagogy in primary language arts; and the interaction of social class, language and classroom participation. Melissa E. Libertus is a Researcher with a PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience from Duke University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the development of mathematical thinking in infancy and early childhood. Sarah C. Lightner is an Assistant Professor in the Literacy Department at West Chester University. Her research interests concern critical literacy, young adult literature and the role of dialogue in reading comprehension. M. Beatrice Ligorio is Professor in Educational Psychology. She has a PhD in Psychology of Communication. Her research concerns collaborative learning, socio-constructivism, identity, e-learning and blended learning. She has been a member of the executive of a few international scientific organisations (EARLI; ISCAR), and she is currently the main editor of the Qwerty Journal.

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Contributors

Sten Ludvigsen is a Researcher with a PhD in educational sciences/educational psychology from the University of Oslo 1998. His research focuses on how students use digital resources in co-located and distributed settings in specific school subjects. The research is based on a sociocultural stance to learning and cognition. Fiona Maine is a Senior Lecturer in literacy education at the University of Cambridge. Her research is focused on the responses of children as they read visual and multimodal texts together. She is the principal investigator of a three-year European project exploring the role of dialogue supporting cultural literacy learning. James Mannion is a Bespoke Programmes Leader at the London Centre for Leadership in Learning, UCL Institute of Education. He is a member of Oracy Cambridge, a study centre dedicated to promoting effective speaking and listening skills in schools and the wider society, and the Director of Rethinking Education. Giuseppina Marsico is an Associate Professor of Development and Educational Psychology at the University of Salerno (Italy), Visiting Professor at PhD Programme in Psychology, Federal University of Bahia, (Brazil) and Affiliated Researcher at the Centre for Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University (Denmark). She is editor-in-chief of four book series (Springer) and coeditor of Human Arenas Journal (Springer). Susan Jean Mayer is a developmental learning and curriculum theorist who writes on a range of issues related to democratic PK-12 practice and the study of learning within schools. Her 2012 book, Classroom Discourse and Democracy: Making Meanings Together, focuses on distinctively democratic processes of knowledge construction in classrooms. Katherine McLay is a Lecturer at the School of Education at the University of Queensland, Australia. She is a sociocultural scholar whose research interests include dialogic teaching, the ways that learners take up and resist digital learning tools and learner identities and the professional identity development of preservice teachers. Nathalie Muller Mirza is Assistant Professor at the University of Lausanne. Her main research interest focuses on psychological processes, in a cultural-historical perspective that integrates the constitutive role of social interactions and culture in learning. Her research concerns the role of interactions in educational settings and transition in multicultural contexts. Kiyotaka Miyazaki is a Professor of Psychology at the Faculty of Human Sciences, Waseda University, Japan. His research interest is constructing the dialogic pedagogical theory from the Japanese teachers’ knowledge of practice based on theories of dialogism such as Bakhtin, Gadamer and other dialogic pedagogies. P. Karen Murphy is Distinguished Professor of Education at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on the role of critical-analytic thinking in teaching and learning including the development and implementation of curricular interventions that maximise the interactive effects of reasoning and classroom discussion on students’ comprehension and content-area learning. Debra Myhill is the Director of the Centre for Research in Writing at the University of Exeter. Her research interests focus principally on writing, the teaching of writing and being a writer, particularly the linguistic and metalinguistic aspects of writing and the composing processes involved in writing.

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Ruth Newman is Senior Lecturer in Language Education at the University of Exeter and member of the Centre for Research in Writing. Her research interests focus on the role of talk in the teaching of language and literacy, including the role of metatalk in the development of metalinguistic understanding and writing. Catherine O’Connor is Professor of Education and Linguistics at Boston University. She has studied classroom discourse for several decades, examining the role of talk in promoting student reasoning and participation. A current focus is how teachers learn to integrate content goals and equity concerns in whole-class dialogic discourse. Manoli Pifarré is Associate Professor in Educational Psychology at the Universitat de Lleida (Spain) and Honorary Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter (UK). She leads Context and Cognition with ICT research group (web site: www.contic. udl.cat). She has led different R+D projects about developing thinking, creativity and collaboration with technology. Sarah Pollack is a Researcher who received her PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Her research interests focus on understanding learning processes in an ethno-politically based environment in order to devise an instructional model suitable in an age of pluralism, multiculturalism and digitalism. Antti Rajala is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki. Currently, he is working in the project Constituting Cultures of Compassion in Early Childhood Education (2016–2020). Rajala is one of the editors of Outlines: Critical Practice Studies. Ingvill Rasmussen is Professor at the Department of Education, University of Oslo. Her background is educational psychology and her research focus is on talk and collaboration and how digital technologies transform learning practices. Rasmussen also designs digital tools in collaboration with teachers and technology developers to support learning in formal schooling. Peter Renshaw is Professor of Education at the University of Queensland. He researches the process of education from a sociocultural perspective, influenced by Bakhtin and Vygotsky. Currently he is researching children’s emotional engagements with the more-than-human world through the lens of perezhivanie and place-responsive pedagogy. Lauren B. Resnick is Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, and Learning Sciences and Education Policy (emeritus), at the University of Pittsburgh. Her recent work focuses on the role of talk and argumentation in learning and the nature and development of thinking abilities and general intelligence. Sergio Reyes-Angona is Professor of the Department of Literature at Universidad de las Americas-Puebla (UDLAP), Mexico, and Director of the Writing Centre at UDLAP. He is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers, and a specialist in innovations for teacher continuous professional development and literacy skills in Higher Education. Alina Reznitskaya is a Professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at Montclair State University. Dr Reznitskaya examines the role of social interaction in the development of students’ argumentation skills. She also designs and evaluates professional development efforts that help teachers improve the quality of argumentation during class discussions. Sylvia Rojas-Drummond is Professor at National Autonomous University of Mexico and Director at the Laboratory of Cognition and Communication. She received her PhD in Experimental xxii

Contributors

Psychology from the University of Tennessee. She is also a visiting scholar at the Universities of Oxford, Bristol, Exeter, Cambridge, California, Utrecht, Lausanne and the Open University. Faith Schantz is a professional writer and editor in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Baruch B. Schwarz is Professor at the School of Education, the Hebrew University. As a specialist in the role of argumentation in learning and development, he has led several CSCL projects on the use of technologies to boost deliberative argumentation, productive discourse, collaborative learning and ‘Learning to Learn’ skills. Anna Sfard is a Professor Emerita at the University of Haifa, Israel. As a learning scientist, she investigates relations between thinking and communication. She is the recipient of the 2007 Freudenthal Award, a Fellow of American Educational Research Association (AERA) and a member of the American National Academy of Education (NAEd). David Skidmore is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Bath, UK. He has worked in the field of dialogic pedagogy for over 20 years and is a member of the editorial board of Language and Education. His research interests include pedagogy, dialogue, inclusive education and prosody. Benzi Slakmon is a learning scientist interested both in the theory and pedagogy of dialogic education. Slakmon studies the relation between society, pedagogy, technology and learning. His work involves research-informed technological and pedagogical text-based CSCL environments. Julia Snell is Associate Professor in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. Her current research investigates how language ideologies and inequalities are reproduced in educational contexts. She has also researched and published on dialect variation and social class, linguistic ethnography and teacher professional development. Marta Soler-Gallart is Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona and Director of CREA (Community of Research on Excellence for All). She is editor of ‘International Sociology’, Vice-President of ESA (European Sociological Association) and main researcher of SOLIDUS (H2020). Anna O. Soter is Professor Emerita at the Ohio State University, and Adjunct Professor at Columbus College of Art & Design and Self Design Graduate Institute. Her scholarly interests are literary theory and teaching literature, language and literacy, classroom dialogue and discussion, language as a field of energy and poetry and wellbeing. Judith Kleine Staarman is a Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School of Education at Exeter University and director of Thinking Schools @Exeter. She is interested in how people learn, think and create together through collaboration and dialogue, with and without interactive technologies, and has published widely on these topics. Aik-Ling Tan is an Associate Professor at the Natural Sciences and Science Education academic group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is currently the Deputy Head for Teaching and Curriculum matters. Her research examines classroom interactions and emotion in science learning through studying talk. Kok Sing Tang is an Associate Professor and Discipline Lead of the STEM Education Research Group at Curtin University, Australia. His research examines how language and multimodal representations afford and mediate science learning. He is a co-founder of the SIG Languages & Literacies within the European Science Education Research Association (ESERA). xxiii

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Luca Tateo is Associate Professor in Epistemology and History of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University. His research interests are the study of imagination as higher psychological function, the cultural psychology of education and the epistemology and history of psychological sciences in order to reflect upon the future trends of psychological research and related methodological issues. Yuyao Tong is a PhD student at the Faculty of Education of the University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on classroom meta-dialogue and students’ understanding of the nature of discourse in knowledge building. Stefan Trausan-Matu is Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University Politehnica of Bucharest and scientific researcher at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of the Romanian Academy. His research interests are: computer-supported collaborative learning, human–computer interaction, natural language processing, discourse analysis, music and computers and philosophy. Toshiyasu Tsuruhara is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and undergraduate supervisor at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. He is also an accredited community mediator. Toshi’s research interests lie in conflict mediation and restorative justice, with a focus on personal and relational transformation through dialogue and the role of active listening, empathy and silence. Maria Vrikki is a Postdoctoral Researcher currently working at the University of Cyprus and previously at the University of Cambridge. Her research mainly concerns educational dialogue within the classroom context (including technology-mediated dialogue). Her work also focuses on the role and quality of professional dialogues in teacher collaborative learning. Paul Warwick is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. His research and teaching activities focus on oracy and dialogue in teaching and learning, primary science education, technology in teaching and learning and the professional development of beginning teachers. Noreen M. Webb is Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research spans domains in learning and instruction and measurement theory and applications, with a particular focus on the measurement of learning and teaching processes and performance of individuals and groups in classroom settings. Paul Webb is Professor Emeritus at the Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. His interests lie in the development of thinking skills, language and cultural issues in science teaching and learning, the effects of productive discussion in classrooms and the development of scientific literacy in general. Ian A.G.Wilkinson is Professor of Educational Sciences – Literacy in the School of Curriculum and Pedagogy and School of Learning, Development and Professional Practice at the University of Auckland. His research interests are literacy learning and teaching, reading comprehension, classroom dialogue, discussion, argumentation, dialogic pedagogy and related teacher professional development. Joy Zimmerman is a graduate student in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on student engagement and persistence in the adult mathematics classroom.

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INTRODUCTION TO THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF RESEARCH ON DIALOGIC EDUCATION Rupert Wegerif, Neil Mercer and Louis Major

The interactive process of teaching and learning relies heavily on the use of dialogue for sharing knowledge and developing understanding; the effectiveness of classroom teaching, for example, depends to a great extent on how well teachers and students use talk to communicate. Dialogic education is an approach to pedagogy and curriculum which emphasises the role and importance of dialogue and critically examines how it can best be created and sustained. As demonstrated by contributions to this Handbook reporting research undertaken in Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America and South America, there is an increasing international interest in the role of dialogue in education.This interest has been motivated, in part, by current global challenges and contemporary thinking about the purposes of education. For example, links have been made between a dialogic approach to education and the development of learners’ critical and higher-level thinking, the enabling of more productive learning interactions, the promotion of creative problem-solving and the acquisition of ‘21st-century’ skills in working collaboratively. Dialogic education has also been seen as a means for making connections between subject disciplines, encouraging active and democratic citizenship and enabling people to live together more peacefully. Some might think that this is asking too much of a pedagogic approach and that might be right except that for many educational researchers dialogic education is more than just a pedagogical approach; it is also the basis for a general reconceptualisation of educational aims and practices. Whether they involve a reconceptualisation of education or not, each of the chapters in this Handbook shows how dialogic education can make a real contribution to the many challenges that education faces today. As the first Handbook of research in this area, this volume marks the coming of age of dialogic education as a distinct topic and an important area of applied educational research. The authors of the Handbook’s 47 chapters include many eminent researchers, who offer a comprehensive overview of the main ideas and themes that make up this exciting and diverse field. Through presenting and discussing the views and research of leading international experts, the chapters provide a comprehensive account of the range of approaches to dialogic education and add to the growing body of evidence about its educational value and impact. By identifying weaknesses as well as strengths in this body of evidence, this extensive collection of work provides a secure foundation for the development of future research. We think that the research

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in this Handbook can contribute to a shift in how education is understood, prompting a greater focus on the significance of dialogue in the process of teaching and learning and in defining educational aims and outcomes.

Defining ‘dialogic education’ The concept of ‘dialogue’ draws on many different traditions and is open to several different definitions. In everyday speech the term can be used to refer to almost any kind of social interaction where words or other signs are exchanged between people. Mikhail Bakhtin, often referred to as a strong influence on contemporary approaches to dialogic education, defined dialogue in an interrogative way by claiming that, ‘If an answer does not give rise to a new question from itself, it falls out of the dialogue’ (Bakhtin 1986, p. 168). While ‘face-to-face’ talk is clearly important to educational dialogue, Bakhtin’s definition of dialogue does not apply only to spoken language. For Bakhtin dialogue is not just about talk or texts but includes the more general idea that the inter-animation of different perspectives, held together in the tension of a dialogue, can lead to new insights (Bakhtin, 1984). For those who follow Bakhtin, therefore, it would seem that some forms of music (jazz for example) and improvised dance can be dialogic. Others in the field take a Vygotskian perspective, in which educational dialogue is essentially the interactive use of language for learning and in which language acquisition and use shape children’s cognitive development (Vygotsky, 1978). A range of different perspectives on educational dialogue are represented in this volume. Focusing on the term itself, ‘dialogue’ can be defined in three main ways (Wegerif, 2019): i. a ‘dictionary’ or ‘everyday’ definition ii. an epistemological definition iii. an ontological definition A ‘dictionary’ or ‘everyday’ definition of dialogue. Within dictionaries, dialogue is typically treated as synonymous with conversation. The term ‘dialogic’ is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as an adjective applied to describe anything ‘relating to or in the form of dialogue’.1 This is the first kind of definition that can be applied in dialogic education. Where there is collaborative learning amongst students or a high level of open-ended teacher–student interaction this might be referred to as ‘dialogic education’ without specifying any more technical meaning for ‘dialogic’ than that the teaching and learning takes the form of a dialogue. An epistemological definition of dialogue. Another conception of dialogue is as offering a theory of meaning. This starts with the claim that the meaning of any utterance (or ‘meaning unit’) can only be understood in a context, more specifically through the position and role of that utterance in a larger dialogue, in which it is a response to previous utterances and is trying to elicit or have some impact upon future utterances (Rommetveit, 1992; Linell, 2009). The term ‘dialogic’ used in this more technical way is in contrast to the term ‘monologic’, which expresses the idea that everything has one correct meaning in one true perspective on the world. From a dialogic epistemological perspective, we can have no direct knowledge of an external world but only within dialogue as an aspect of dialogue. This is because knowledge has to take the form of an answer to a question and questions arise in the context of dialogue, both dialogue between human voices and dialogue with the larger context or the world around. Since the dialogue is never closed, the questions we ask will change and so what counts as knowledge is never final. It follows from this dialogic conception of knowledge that it is at least as important

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to teach students how to construct knowledge together with others (so that they can participate more fully and effectively in constructing knowledge) as it is to teach them knowledge as a set of facts, which may over time be subject to change. This epistemological definition of dialogue implies that education should be designed to engage students in an ongoing process of shared enquiry that takes the form of a dialogue (Wells, 1999; Linell, 2009). For example, the dialogic approach to teaching developed by Robin Alexander (discussed in Robin’s chapter that appears in this volume, Chapter 47) has this epistemological focus, drawing students into the process of the joint construction of knowledge. Such a conception also informs the promotion of Exploratory Talk (Littleton & Mercer, 2013; see also Mercer, Mannion & Warwick, Chapter 20 in this volume) and Accountable Talk (Michaels, O’Connor & Resnick, 2008) in educational settings. A similar epistemological perspective also underpins the Philosophy for Children movement, based on Lipman’s (2003) work. An ontological definition of dialogue. An ontological conception of dialogue is concerned with the very nature of our existence and identity. Some claim that taking a dialogic perspective seriously as a theory of meaning implies that dialogue is not only a means to knowledge construction mediating between selves and reality but that selves and reality are also part of the dialogue (Wegerif, 2019). Applied to education, this ontological interpretation of dialogue suggests that it is not just a tool to be used to jointly construct knowledge and understanding but that engagement in dialogue offers a way to change ourselves and to change our reality. This perspective suggests that dialogue itself should be a product of education, perhaps the most important product. Different versions of this ontologic kind of dialogic education focus on either understanding and transforming a) the self or b) reality as a whole or c) social reality. Understanding the self as a dialogic author and education as developing both the freedom and the responsibility of this authorial self is a focus of one ontological strand of dialogic educational theory (Matusov, 2009; Sidorkin, 1999). Another strand gives more attention to the transformation of reality – seeing education as a journey of discovery from the initial illusion of selves and objects as separate entities within an external fixed reality to the realisation that both are aspects of a kind of universal dialogue that we can learn to participate in more fully and more effectively (Kennedy, 2014; Wegerif, 2011). A more political interpretation of dialogic education can be seen in the work of Freire (1971), within which it becomes a means to empower the oppressed so that they can learn to ‘name’ their own reality through a movement that is both an expansion of consciousness and at the same time a transformation of social reality. We suggest that a recognition of these three ways of defining dialogue can provide a useful conceptualisation for educational research. As illustrated by many of the chapters featured in this Handbook, they are interconnected and not incompatible. Indeed, many approaches to dialogic education combine some element of all three.

History and development of the field Dialogic education has deep roots in oral education traditions. The Greek philosopher Socrates, essentially an oral thinker who taught through dialogue, is often credited as being the originator of dialogic education. But while his explicit statements about pedagogy focus on the importance of open-ended questioning and so could be perceived as dialogic, his actual practice as described by Plato (in dialogues such as the Meno) can seem to be little more than coercive persuasion or even intellectual bullying. A careful analysis of all of his reported dialogues suggests that Socrates’ practice should be considered more dialectic than dialogic (Matusov, 2009).

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Some principles of dialogic education are referred to in ancient Indian texts and even feature on the pillars of Asoka that date back to the 4th century bce (Sen, 2005). Halaqah, the idea of forming circles of learning, is a traditional Islamic approach to education that continues to be used to this day (Ahmed, Chapter 45 in this volume). Martin Buber’s account of the importance of reciprocal ‘I–Thou’ relationships has had a profound impact on the philosophy of dialogism. In particular, Buber’s idea of ‘das Zwischen’ or the ‘space of the “in-between”’ (Buber, 1958) is foundational for an understanding of ‘dialogic space’ (Wegerif & Major, 2018; Lambirth, Bruce, Clough, Nutbrown & David, 2016). Paulo Freire was perhaps the first to put forward an explicitly dialogic theory of education (1971). His writing remains influential today, especially in Spain and Latin America (FernándezCárdenas & Reyes-Angona, Chapter 8 in this volume). As mentioned earlier, the writings of Bakhtin have also been influential in the last few decades, especially in Northern Europe and the USA, despite these being more philosophical and literary than educational (Bakhtin, 1986). As also mentioned earlier, Vygotsky (1978) has been a strong influence on dialogic education, especially through his argument that the acquisition and use of language plays an important role in developing children’s thinking. According to Vygotsky, thinking is an internalised form of self-talk, a dialogue with oneself (Stahl, Cress, Ludvigsen & Law, 2014). Interaction with others, mediated by language, enables this internal dialogue to become ‘reasoned’. He describes language as both a cultural tool (for the development and sharing of knowledge amongst members of a community or society) and as a psychological tool (for structuring the processes and content of individual thought), proposing there is a close relationship between these two kinds of use, which can be summed up in the claim that ‘intermental’ (social, interactional) activity forges some of the most important ‘intra-mental’ (individual, cognitive) capabilities (Mercer, Hennessy & Warwick, 2017; Mercer, 2000, 2019). Vygotsky’s (1986) idea of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) in particular, where learners are drawn beyond their current understanding by working with a teacher, adult or more competent peer (Kazak, Wegerif & Fujita, 2015), is one that brings the idea of dialogic relations into education. In the ZPD, the teacher has to engage with the perspective of the student (and vice-versa) in order to connect the development of ideas in the student to the pre-existing culture (Vygotsky, 1986). This also relates to an understanding of education as drawing learners into dialogue with the voices from the past in order to help them find their own voice. This is because even as an individual act, the use of language in thought, speech or writing retains the dialogical character of all language as a historically evolved and culturally established medium of communication among people (Stahl et al., 2014). In more recent times, an important strand of educational research has emerged which emphasises the importance of talk for stimulating children’s cognitive development and its use as both a cognitive and social tool for learning and social engagement. Research within this strand has typically involved the close examination and analysis (both qualitatively and quantitatively) of classroom talk (see Mercer & Dawes, 2014, for a historical review of this research). Drawing heavily upon socio-cultural theory, based on Vygotsky’s work, it has also been accompanied by a heightened awareness of the potential importance of collaborative learning and classroom dialogue for children’s learning and the development of their understanding. Much of the research represented in this Handbook is associated with this line of enquiry. As a result of educational research over the last 30 or so years, we now know significantly more about the role of dialogue and its importance for the processes of teaching and learning. This is clearly demonstrated by the contents of this book. Although not yet supported by much evidence from the kind of large-scale, quasi-experimental studies which have been advocated

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by some critics of educational research (though see the chapters by Alexander and by Howe, Hennessy and Mercer, Chapter 13 in this volume), researchers have identified some ways that teachers can most productively interact with students and some ways of interacting that, while still very common, have been found to have limited value.

Towards the future of dialogic education While emerging under the umbrella of the socio-cultural tradition, dialogic education can be considered as a separate paradigm in its own right. On the one hand dialogues are situated in an empirical sense (i.e. occurring at a certain time, in a certain place, between particular individuals); on the other hand how we understand our situation depends upon dialogues in which acts of situating ourselves have to occur.The focus on the social and historical situatedness of cognition and learning that defines the socio-cultural paradigm tends to limit its capacity to offer a full theory of education. Recent technological advances and the enhanced availability of digital tools have seen increasing attention paid to the interaction between, and possible interdependency of, a dialogic pedagogy and digital technology (Major, Warwick, Rasmussen, Ludvigsen & Cook, 2018). While it might seem to make sense to situate meaning-making in a face-to-face exchange in a classroom, the significance of location in space and time when dialogues are situated on the Internet is less obvious. We need, therefore, a research paradigm which incorporates a theory of education that is appropriate for the 21st century and beyond. For us to respond effectively to the multitude of global challenges humanity faces, educational theory and practice must evolve. We believe that dialogic education has the potential to help address these challenges. This will not just be education for established educational purposes; beyond these is education for new purposes which are only becoming visible as technology and society evolve. Dialogic education, in all its varied forms, offers some potential solutions to the challenges of teaching the knowledge content, competences and skills young people need in an increasingly globalised world, without sacrificing traditional values and standards in education.

Structure of the Handbook This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the current state of research on dialogic education. By drawing together work from leading researchers in one comprehensive volume an overview of the fundamentals of dialogic education is provided. This includes details of underpinning theoretical approaches, debates, methodologies, evidence of impact, how it relates to different areas of the curriculum and also ways in which it responds to the profound educational challenges of our time. The Handbook features 47 chapters from authors working in different educational contexts around the world. In total, 90 authors drawn from 23 countries are involved. Chapters make up seven thematic sections. Each section comes with its own introduction by researchers with a particular interest in the section topic: Section I: The theory of dialogic education Section II: Classroom dialogue Section III: Dialogue, teachers and professional development

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Section IV: Dialogic education for literacy and language Section V: Dialogic education and digital technology Section VI: Dialogic education in science and mathematics Section VII: Dialogic education for transformative purposes The first three sections are theoretical and general in the issues that are considered, while Sections IV–VII are more concerned with specific issues and learning domains. Section I, ‘The theory of dialogic education’, examines and grounds the theory of dialogic education. As the chapters in this section bring out, the concept of ‘dialogue’ that is applied in the practice of ‘dialogic education’ is never simple – there are many different types of dialogue and ways of understanding dialogue. Although each of the chapters in this section differs in their understanding of dialogue, they do so in a way which shows that the field of research on dialogic education has coherence despite such diversity. Following this is the more ‘applied’ focus of chapters in Section II (‘Classroom dialogue’). Building on a rich body of extant research, chapters in this section examine the complex role of dialogue within classroom environments. Connections between the implementation of a dialogic pedagogy and the achievement of goals that both mesh with, and extend, an understanding of the purposes of schooling are amongst issues considered. Several of these themes are built on further in Section III (‘Dialogue, teachers and professional development’). One common emerging theme is that chapters suggest how research needs to attend not only to changes in how dialogues between teachers and students are carried out but also the quality and purposes of professional dialogues that take place amongst and between researchers and teachers. ‘Dialogic education for literacy and language’ is the focus of Section IV. As outlined in the introduction for this section, contributions reflect the broad spectrum of theory and research in this area: considering the teaching of oracy skills in their own right; different approaches to dialogic pedagogy in the teaching of reading and writing; and then a consideration of how teachers orientate themselves within a dialogic pedagogy and the implications for this. As acknowledged previously, from some research perspectives dialogue is not necessarily limited to talk; it can also be found in non-verbal human communication and multimodal forms of dialogue, interaction with text (multimodal and traditional written forms) and interaction with digital artefacts. The latter is the focus of Section V (‘Dialogic education and digital ­technology’). Chapters foreground both the strong lineage of work on dialogic approaches to learning through, or around, digital technology. Themes identified include how digital tools can afford opportunities to make learning visible as an artefact for reflection and improvement, creating a shared space to scrutinise ideas and showing how ideas evolve over time. Research on ‘Dialogic education in science and mathematics’ education is the topic of Section VI. A common interest among all contributions is the relationship between the role of dialogic practices in formal education and students’ learning in this context. In addition to presenting an overview of the findings of recent research, chapters identify a number of challenges and avenues for future work. The Handbook concludes with Section VII, ‘Dialogic education for transformative purposes’. Themes recurring throughout include dialogue across time and space; dialogue across differences; dialogue in presence and in absence; dialogue about principles, ethics and values; principles, values and ethics of dialogue; dialogue that is affective, contextual, community driven; and dialogue for establishing truth, for self-reflection and for understanding others’ perspectives. Ultimately, strands coalesce in the study of educational dialogue for transformative purposes, both for individuals and for societies. 6

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The accounts of transformations achieved by high-impact research projects around the world also make this a must-have book for policy makers and practitioners.

Note 1 https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/dialogic (Accessed April 12th 2019)

References Ahmed, F. (this volume). The potential of halaqah to be a transformative Islamic dialogic pedagogy. Alexander, R. (this volume). Dialogic pedagogy in a post-truth world. Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (C. Emerson, ed. and trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas. Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou (2nd edn, R. G. Smith, trans.). Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Fernandez-Cardenas, M., & Reyes-Angona, S. (this volume). Dialogic educational approaches in IberoAmerican countries: A systematic mapping review. Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Howe, C., Hennessy, S., & Mercer, N. (this volume). Classroom dialogue and student attainment: Distinct roles for teacher-led and small-group interaction? Kazak, S.,Wegerif, R., & Fujita,T. (2015).The importance of dialogic processes to conceptual development in mathematics. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 90(2), 105–120. Kennedy, D. (2014). Neoteny, dialogic education and an emergent psychoculture: Notes on theory and practice. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 48(1), 100–117. Lambirth, A., Bruce, T., Clough, P., Nutbrown, C., & David, T. (2016). Dialogic space theory. In Tricia David, Kathy Goouch, & Sacha Powell (Eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophies and Theories of Early Childhood Education and Care (pp. 165–175). Abingdon: Routledge. Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking Language, Mind and World Dialogically: Interactional and Contextual Theories of Human Sense-Making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Lipman, M. (2003). Thinking in Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Littleton, K., & Mercer, N. (2013). Interthinking: Putting Talk to Work. Abingdon: Routledge. Major, L., Warwick, P., Rasmussen, I., Ludvigsen, S., & Cook, V. (2018). Classroom dialogue and digital technologies: A scoping review. Education and Information Technologies, 23(5), 1995–2028. Matusov, E. (2009). Journey into Dialogic Pedagogy. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Publishers. Mercer, N. (2000). Words and Minds: How We Use Language to Think Together. Abingdon: Routledge. Mercer, N. (2019). Language and the Joint Creation of Knowledge: The Selected Works of Neil Mercer. Abingdon: Routledge. Mercer, N., & Dawes, L. (2014). The study of talk between teachers and students, from the 1970s until the 2010s. Oxford Review of Education, 40(4), 430–445. Mercer, N., Hennessy, S., & Warwick, P. (2017). Dialogue, thinking together and digital technology in the classroom: Some educational implications of a continuing line of inquiry. International Journal of Educational Research. doi:10.1016/j.ijer.2017.08.007 Mercer, N., Mannion, J., & Warwick, P. (this volume). Oracy education: The development of young people’s spoken language skills. Michaels, S., O’Connor, C., & Resnick, L. B. (2008). Deliberative discourse idealized and realized: Accountable talk in the classroom and in civic life. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27(4), 283–297. Rommetveit, R. (1992). Outlines of a dialogically based social-cognitive approach to human cognition and communication. In: A. Wold (Ed.) The Dialogical Alternative:Towards a Theory of Language and Mind. Oslo: Scandinavian Press: 19–45. Sen, A. (2005). The Argumentative Indian:Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. London: Macmillan. Sidorkin, A. M. (1999). Beyond Discourse: Education, the Self and Dialogue. New York: State University of New York Press. Stahl, G., Cress, U., Ludvigsen, S., & Law, N. (2014). Dialogic foundations of CSCL. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 9(2), 117–125. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Interaction between learning and development. In Mary Gauvain & Michael Cole (Eds.) Readings on the Development of Children. New York: Scientific American Books.

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Rupert Wegerif, Neil Mercer and Louis Major Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and Language (A. Kozulin, trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wegerif, R. (2011). Towards a dialogic theory of how children learn to think. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 6(3), 179–190. Wegerif, R. (2019). Dialogic education. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Retrieved 8 Jul, 2019, from https://oxfordre.com/education/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/ acrefore-9780190264093-e-396. Wegerif, R., & Major, L. (2018). Buber, educational technology, and the expansion of dialogic space. AI & Society, 34(1), 109–119. Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a Sociocultural Practice and Theory of Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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SECTION I

The theory of dialogic education

INTRODUCTION TO THE THEORY OF DIALOGIC EDUCATION Rupert Wegerif

Dialogue is a dangerous and deceptive word precisely because it sounds so pleasant and ­positive. Who can disagree that dialogue is a good thing? As Anna Sfard writes in her chapter in this theory section of the book, the term ‘dialogic education’ is now being used as an indicator of quality but often without any further definition as to what exactly is meant by ‘dialogic’ or even by the word ‘dialogue’. ‘These days,’ she continues, ‘the confidence in the benefits of talk seems unshaken. But while intuitively irresistible, this belief is still to be theoretically grounded and empirically corroborated’ (Sfard, Chapter 7 in this volume). Examining and grounding the theory of dialogic education is the point of this section and the purpose of each of its chapters. The concept of ‘dialogue’ that is applied in the practice of ‘dialogic education’ is never simple. As the chapters in this section of the book bring out, there are many different types of dialogue and ways of understanding dialogue. Being explicit at least about what we mean by the terms ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialogic education’ is a first step towards exposing dialogic educational practice to serious investigation with a view to understanding how it really works, insofar as it does work, so that we can make it work better. Although each of the chapters in this section differ in their understanding of dialogue they do so in a way which shows that the field of research on dialogic education has coherence despite the divergences. The coherence I am referring to is not the reduction to identity sought by some research traditions but precisely the coherence of a productive dialogue between a range of voices. Skidmore and Murakami remind us of the relevance to research of Bakhtin’s polyphonic account of truth: Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction. (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, p. 110) In the first chapter in this section, ‘towards a theory of dialogic education that is appropriate for the Internet Age’, I put forward a definition of dialogue as the holding together of different incommensurate perspectives in the tension of proximity around a gap of difference, and I

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use this definition to build a general dialogic theory of education as induction into dialogue. These claims are put forward in a fairly tentative way as a framework that could be used to guide further educational research which would test, challenge and develop the theory. The next chapter by Skidmore and Murakami also puts forward a dialogic theory of education but using concepts drawn more directly from Bakhtin and the Bakhtin circle.The themes of creativity, consciousness, different languaged-ness (heteroglossia) and many-voicedness (polyphony) are explored. The chapter concludes with a focus on the importance of improvisation and co-creation in the classroom: By embodying the spirit of collective enquiry in their pedagogic practice, teachers can enable students to develop the ability to join with others in the work of conscious transformation of our social world. A stress on applying theory to transform practice and so to improve the world is found in most of the chapters in this section. However, both Sfard’s chapter and the chapter by Lefstein and Snell caution against the dangers of being too enthusiastic in a simplistic way about dialogic education. These two chapters bring out the need for research to unpack some of the tensions and dilemmas that exist within dialogic education. One tension that emerges in this section, as in the handbook more generally, is that between those who see dialogism as a theory of language and those who extend its significance to include everything. This difference in definition is relevant to whether or not we can describe environmental education as dialogic, an issue raised by the paper by Kim Davies and Peter Renshaw in their chapter entitled ‘Who is talking?’. This chapter proposes the provocative idea of a post-humanist dialogism. Like Skidmore and Murakami, Davies and Renshaw end their chapter on a call for political action, but whereas Skidmore and Murakami limit this to changing the social world, Davies and Renshaw are talking about extending ideas of justice to include the natural world.They are persuasive that the dialogism of Bakhtin means that the human has to be understood as a provisional and unfinalised construction within a larger field of meaning. Some of the relevance of these ideas for ‘special needs education’ is brought out through engagement with those labelled with ASD who see Asperger’s and autism as a neuro-difference and not as a deficit. The exciting idea offered by Davies and Renshaw is that the creative tension between self and other at the heart of dialogism cannot be confined to the way in which we use language but spreads over to our relationship with otherness in general including the otherness of those with physical differences from the norm, the otherness of animals and even the otherness of rocks and trees. Another tension in what we could call the polyphonic truth of dialogic education theory is between those who focus on dialogic education as a pedagogical practice and those who bring in issues of identity. The chapter by Marisco, Tateo, Gomez and Dazzani offers a valuable introduction to Hermans’ dialogic-self theory and argues for the importance of the development of a dialogic educational self. Lefstein and Snell use linguistic ethnography to explore issues of self-identity in dialogic classrooms arguing in particular that dialogic education raises something of a dilemma when it comes to those who tend to get labelled as ‘not good at dialogue’. Baker, Andreissen and Schwarz, on the other hand, explore issues in the practice of dialogic education defining learning as change in talk and defining some of the useful and varied ways in which this can be measured without referring to shifts in identity. A tension that Anna Sfard brings up is that between commensurate and incommensurate discourses in education. She refers to my definition of dialogue as involving incommensurability and asks, reasonably, what teachers should do in areas of commensurate discourse such as m ­ athematics. 12

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One aim in mathematics classrooms is to teach that 2 + 2 = 4 and that the alternatives are wrong. Sfard’s response is to distinguish between what she call ‘ontic’ (commensurate) and ‘deontic’ (incommensurate) discourses seeing the value of both in relation to different areas of the curriculum and different teaching aims.The difference between teaching right and wrong in mathematics and teaching empathy in civics for example. Another possible response to this challenge is signalled in my chapter. This response is that teaching awareness of alternatives, even wrong ones, is fruitful for teaching in a way that promotes conceptual understanding and creativity.The tension between the apparent incommensurability of perspectives held together in creative tension in a Bakhtinian version of dialogue and the importance of teaching for commensurability in some school subjects such as maths is a very important one which I am sure will generate more fruitful debate. Another tension in the field is brought out by a survey of papers on dialogic education in Ibero-America (Fernández-Cárdenas and Reyes-Angona, Chapter 8 in this volume).This literature review reveals greater reference to Freire than to Bakhtin. Freire was a revolutionary educator and many of the dialogic education papers found in the Ibero-American context focus more on condemning inequality than on teaching competences. Many of these papers also contain a conceptualisation of dialogic education as an act of resistance to the political status quo behind current education systems. This tension perhaps relates to the question of whether it is compatible with dialogic education theory to teach a pre-established curriculum or whether empowering students through dialogue needs to be more open-ended (Matusov & Wegerif, 2014). Dialogue is productive between two limits. On the inside, coincidence kills dialogue. When there is too little difference between the voices in any dialogue there is unlikely to be much progress. On the other hand too great a perceived or experienced divergence between voices can also undermine the productivity or usefulness of dialogues. Like Odysseus a teacher of dialogue has to learn how to steer a course between the Scylla or rock of positivist truth on the one hand and the Charybdis or whirlpool of relativism on the other. This is also true of book editors. I would characterise this theory section of our handbook of research on dialogic education by the Bakhtinian term ‘polyphonic truth’, a truth that emerges from the interaction between a range of voices in a dialogic field and is not so much a final accomplishment as a direction of travel. Each of the chapters in this section takes a different point of view in a way which is fruitfully contrasting rather than simply complementary because these differences have the potential to stimulate thoughtful insights which illuminate the field as a whole and responses which will take the dialogue further.

References Bakhtin, M. M. (1929/1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson, with an Introduction by Wayne C. Booth (C. Emerson, Trans.). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Matusov, E., & Wegerif, R. (2014). Dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: Has Rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 2(1), 1–20.

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1 TOWARDS A DIALOGIC THEORY OF EDUCATION FOR THE INTERNET AGE Rupert Wegerif

Introduction This chapter begins with a brief outline of the way in which print literacy influences the practice of education, how we think about education and also, more generally, how we think about anything and everything. A dialogic theory of education is then outlined that can apply equally to education in oral societies, literate societies and the emerging global Internet-based society. This theory is outlined in the form of answers to the questions: “How do children learn? What should we teach them? How should we teach them?”

The importance of communications technology to the practice and the theory of education Education in oral societies is different from education in literate societies. As well as apprenticeship education through a relationship with specific others (Rogoff, Paradise, Arauz, CorreaChávez & Angelillo, 2003), most oral societies have initiation ceremonies drawing young people into a living relationship with more generalised cultural voices sometimes referred to as the ancestors (Turner, 1987). Modern mass schooling developed after the advent of print literacy with a focus on teaching literacy and numeracy. Subjects in schools and universities are still largely defined by the key textbook or canon of books that need to be read. The specific cognitive affordances of literacy combined with printing presses make it possible to see education as the transmission of knowledge. In contrast to oral education, the idea here is that knowledge is not always bound up with living relationships but is something that can be stored in books and transmitted into brains. Print literacy lies behind and makes possible a decontextualized understanding of thinking and of knowledge (Toulmin, 1990; Goody, 1977; Ong, 1982). Both Piaget and Vygotsky, for example, developing their theories in the 1920s, describe the development of knowledge and understanding in terms of abstract cognitive schemas largely divorced from contextual embodiment in living relationships with other voices (Wegerif, 1999; Wertsch, 2013; Matusov & Hayes, 2000). In oral societies, by contrast, thinking and knowledge are always experienced in the context of living relationships between embodied voices (Ong, 1982; Goody, 1977).1 14

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The change in the dominant means of communication from print literacy to the Internet has implications for how we think that are potentially as significant as the change from oracy to literacy (Poster, 1995;Wegerif, 2013).Whereas print is a one to many medium, with the production and dissemination of knowledge dependent on access to a printing press, the Internet is a many to many medium allowing every participant to be a producer as a well as a consumer of knowledge (Ritzer, 2014). In this way, the Internet returns us to some of the dialogic affordances of oral societies but with the difference that the dialogue is now no longer limited to face-to-face groups. Of course, previous modes of communication and associated educational and cognitive practices continue. Literacy did not replace oracy but augmented it. Similarly, print literacy continues into the Internet age. But the Internet transforms print into a medium capable of supporting near-instantaneous dialogue between an indefinitely large number of people and augments print with multi-modal communication producing a new and extended form of embodiment. Dialogism was the default mode for oral societies. The fact that there is so much interest in dialogism now might be because the Internet has brought something of a return to ways of thinking and educating in oral societies. Walter Ong referred to electronic communication as a ‘secondary orality’ (Ong, 1982), and Geoffrey Ulmer refers to the new form, ‘Electracy’, which has many features of oracy but in an augmented and extended form (Ulmer, 2003).

A dialogic theory of how children learn The word education is from a Latin root meaning ‘to lead out’. A dialogic theory of education returns to this root meaning of the word education in claiming that we learn through dialogues and that we are first called into dialogue by others. It is part of the argument that the experience of the otherness of others is not easy to separate out into neat categories. A new-born infant, for example, experiences his or her mother as a specific individual and, at one and the same time, as a stand-in for human otherness in general. Nonetheless, it is useful analytically to think about the call of otherness in education in terms of three categories of others: Specific others, Generalised Others and the Infinite Other. In a child’s development, it makes sense to focus initially on the educational role of apparently specific others such as parents. When it comes to formal education non-physical non-present generalised cultural others play a more explicit role. Teachers serve as professional ‘stand-ins’ for more generalised cultural voices that children and students have to engage with. In addition to specific others and Generalised Others, children are always in dialogic interaction with otherness in general. Following Levinas otherness in general, or the otherness of others, is referred to as the ‘Infinite Other’.The concept of the Infinite Other is not a ‘Big Other’ concept, as some critics sardonically suggest (Zizek, 2011), but it is rather a grammatical nominalisation or giving a name to a process, in this case the process of going beyond. In mathematics, infinity is introduced to children with the idea that however big a number they can think of there is always a bigger number. In a similar way, the infinity of the Infinite Other lies in always going beyond whatever image we have formed of the other.

Being called into dialogue by specific others The visual cliff experiment is dramatic: If you have not seen it before I recommend looking it up on YouTube. Transparent Perspex is used to create an apparatus which confronts infants with the realistic illusion of a cliff edge which they can crawl out over. In an evocative experiment, Sorce and his colleagues (Sorce, Emde, Campos & Klinnert, 1985) demonstrated that 15

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infants would only crawl out over the cliff if their mothers were standing on the far side of the cliff encouraging them with positive emotional signals such as smiles. By contrast, if their mothers frowned or showed signs of fear then the infants would refuse to cross the apparent cliff. This experiment can serve as an evocative metaphor for the role of significant others in education. The importance that the quality of relationships has for cognitive, social and emotional development is a finding of many studies (Baron-Cohen, 2011; Hobson, 1998; Sethna et al., 2017). Research also suggests that the kind of relationship that is good for cognitive development is a dialogic or reciprocal turn-taking relationship (Braten, 1988; Trevarthen, 1979). The importance of dialogue for development has recently been confirmed by a large empirical research study. Investigating the earlier hypothesis that the number of words children hear before the age of three influences their language development, a team at MIT led by Rachel Romeo demonstrated that the number of words was not as significant as the number of conversational turn-taking interactions (Romeo et al., 2018). In some branches of communications theory, it is posited that transmitters of information first have intentions, then encode their ideas into a signal and then transmit to the receiver for decoding (Shannon, 1948). This transmission model of communication is still sometimes assumed as the default model in psychology. Causation in dialogue is different because the other or addressee is not only found at the end of a transmission process but is always also already there at the beginning of each utterance (Rommetveit, 1992). For example, when a six-year-old girl asks me to help her build a LEGO model I spontaneously respond to her with very different language and intonation than I find myself using when my dean asks me to explain the latest research funding figures. Exploring this phenomenon in the interaction of babies with mothers and other primary care-givers, Braten posited an innate capacity to participate in the expressions and feelings of others which he calls the ‘virtual other’ on the inside of the self and relates to the recent discovery in neuroscience of mirror-neurons (Braten, 2003). The claim from Braten, Hobson,Trevarthen and others is that we do not smile in order to communicate our inner feelings to a baby: The baby smiles and we are called to smile back. The paradox of education is how anyone can ever learn anything new. If we know what we are looking for, Socrates pointed out in the Meno, then there is no need to inquire into it but if we do not know what we are looking for then we cannot know how to begin to inquire into it, and we would not recognise it even if we found it (Plato, 380 bce/2006). The dialogic theory answer to this challenge is that, in a dialogue, we are always already on two sides, both inside and outside of ourselves, looking out from the inside of the dialogic couple to the other and also looking in from the outside to locate the self. When I speak to you in a dialogue you are already inside me; I embody you in order to be able to speak to you. When you speak to me, on the other hand, I have to see myself as if from your point of view and, indeed, beyond that from an outside point of view in general. Studies of early cognitive development, like those of Braten and others referred to by Gallagher (2012) as well as those of Romeo et al. (2018), appear to support the dialogic claim, that it is the ‘inside–out’ and ‘outside–in’ nature of dialogic interactions that explains how learning occurs. Bakhtin, for example, pointed out that there is a big difference in educational effect between an authoritative voice and an internally persuasive voice. The authoritative voice, he claims, remains outside of me and orders me to do something in a way that forces me to accept or reject it without engaging with it whereas the words of the persuasive voice enter into the realm of my own words and change them from within (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 343). Education, as opposed to training or dressage, requires this persuasive or dialogic voice that crosses the boundary between self and other to speak to the student as if from within. 16

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Being called into dialogue by Generalised Others In South Africa, an educational intervention using mobile phones can be used to illustrate how central to education the Generalised Other is and how spontaneously it arises. The project used mobile phones and text messaging to provide help with homework for children. Children could text a question about their mathematics homework, and volunteers would answer them. The volunteers were anonymous members of a network called ‘Dr Maths’. To get help the children had to question ‘Dr Maths’ and respond to ‘Dr Maths’ (Butgereit, 2007). Here the specificity of the others as Sue or John was not nearly as important as their generality as stand-ins for the cultural voice of mathematics. Relationships with specific others are particularly important to learning in the early years and continue to be important for learning throughout life. However formal education in particular brings in a relationship with a more Generalised Other. The Generalised Other is an idea from George Herbert Mead. He used the example of learning to play organised games such as football for the way in which children do not just learn to relate to specific individuals but also learn to relate to the general norms and rules of a culture. As well as learning how to argue in order to persuade specific others, children have to learn how to argue in terms of ‘what anyone would think’ which is to learn the norms and rules of thinking within a community (Mead, 1934). In every area of formal education, one does not just learn mathematics, science or history; one learns how to be able to invoke the voice of mathematics, science or history and to think with that voice. The process of education then is only partly about using cultural voices as tools to think with (Wertsch, 1991); it is also partly about allowing oneself to be possessed by cultural voices, the voices of the ancestors, so that one can incarnate these voices.When education works what could be experienced as the possession of the self by initially alien voices is matched by the expansion and empowerment of the self. The original voices of the self engage in dialogue with the new incoming voices in such a way that shared new educational self dialogues emerge (Hermans, 2002; Marsico, Tateo, Gomes & Virgínia, Chapter 4 in this volume). The theory that school subjects such as mathematics have voices and personalities has practical implications for education. Most learning theories refer to reflection as a causal driver leading to change as if reflection was an emotionally neutral and purely mechanical kind of process. In Piaget’s theory, for example, it is a learner’s reflection on the logical inconsistencies in his or her experience that drives development (Piaget, 1970; Simon, Tzur, Heinz & Kinzel, 2004). This theory does not explain why children, of similar ability, react to challenges in different ways (Littleton, Light, Joiner, Messer & Barnes, 1998). Dialogic education theory offers an explanatory hypothesis that all ‘reflection’ is a form of dialogue. Asking children to ‘reflect’ in the mathematics classroom can be the same as asking them to engage in open-ended dialogue with ‘Dr Maths’. Some might respond well because they like Dr Maths, others might be terrified by Dr Maths (Carey et al., 2019), and others might just fail to connect because the image of mathematics found in the cultural image, its masculinity and lack of emotion for example, does not connect with them (Walkerdine, 1990). The implication here is that education as a whole can be understood using the metaphor of the visual cliff experiment: Those children who manage to develop a warm relationship with the Generalised Other voices that call to them from the other side of the cliff of unknowing are able to carry on crawling forwards whilst those who do not develop such a relationship get left behind or, indeed, turn back in fear.

Being called into dialogue by the Infinite Other Mead refers to the Generalised Other as the voice of the community as if this were singular and coherent. But Mead was writing at a time before the Internet when communities were commonly thought of as relatively homogenous. Diversity has increased. With the Internet it is 17

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possible to participate in many different cultural communities in a short space of time without even the need for physical travel. This cultural diversity raises an issue for the Generalised Other concept: How do we educate children to think well in the context of multiple voices when these are apparently pulling in different directions? Bakhtin claimed that there is, structurally, always a ‘third voice’ in every dialogue, the voice of the witness (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 168). We can illustrate this with a practical example from classroom research. A group of three nine-year-old children are trying to solve a non-verbal reasoning test problem. This involves seeing patterns in graphical puzzles. One of them (Trisha) says words to the effect that ‘It is answer A because look … ’ (pointing to a feature of the puzzle). Another child (George) responds ‘No it’s not, it’s answer B, because look … ’ (pointing to a different feature of the puzzle). Trisha replies to this challenge ‘You’re right it is not A’ and looks perplexed as do George and Sue (the other member of the group) (the original example roughly paraphrased here can be found in more detail in Wegerif, 2005). One common way of referring to what is happening in this kind of classroom dialogue is that Trisha has learnt to see the puzzle through the eyes of George. His pointing to key features has directed her gaze to see what he sees. But this is not what happened. Trisha does not engage with his point of view at all. The moment that he challenges her she looks again at the puzzle and sees that her original answer cannot be right. In changing her mind Trisha did not rely on George’s voice but on another voice in the dialogue, seeing as if through the eyes of a witness or taking the perspective of Bakhtin’s superaddressee. In some ways, Bakhtin’s superaddressee concept could be seen as another version of Mead’s Generalised Other concept. However, there is a notion of infinity at the heart of Bakhtin’s concept that we do not find in Mead (to my knowledge). The superaddressee is the listener who understands and, according to Bakhtin, the word’s search for understanding is infinite; it does not stop at any point. This is why for Bakhtin there is no final meaning of the word (1986). It follows from Bakhtin’s account that if you try to pin down this superaddressee position in order to dialogue with it you will always find another superaddressee position popping up. While within a specific cultural context the superaddressee might take on a particular form which we dialogue with, this could be an image of Dr Math (or an image of God or an image of science); then there will also be a witness or superaddressee position generated by this dialogue which challenges that image. In other words, if one is open in a dialogue and listens closely, there is no final position but always a voice from outside the current consensus knocking on the window with a new perspective, asking to be heard.2 Adding a concept of the Infinite Other to our understanding of how educational dialogue works has practical implications. The voice of the Infinite Other is an aspect of every dialogue. It accounts for the potential creativity of every dialogue. The concept of the Infinite Other is another way of saying that we should orient ourselves towards the other in any dialogue with humility and with a spirit of openness to the possibility of learning something new.

The dialogic educational relationship The learning that occurs in education as a response to being called out by the other, whether conceptualised as a specific other, Generalised Other or Infinite Other, is dialogic learning which means that it is always a creative co-construction arising out of the tension of different voices held together in a relationship of proximity. One way to understand the key role of dialogue in education is through re-visiting and re-thinking Vygotsky’s account of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) (Vygotsky, 1987).Vygotsky describes how, in the ZPD, children can be led

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by teachers to link their spontaneously arising understandings to concepts already existing in the culture. For example, the child’s procedural understanding of addition, derived from counting on their fingers, can be connected with a more conceptual understanding of addition which, once learnt, can then be disembedded from the context of using fingers and applied to new contexts such as writing numbers on a page. In the ZPD there is a dialogic tension between the voice of a child’s spontaneously arising understanding on the basis of their own experience and the voice of the teacher representing, according to Vygotsky, cultural knowledge. In Vygotsky’s version, the spontaneously arising concepts of the child are grafted onto a system of pre-existing cultural concepts in a one-way journey. Mercer has developed Vygotsky’s ZPD into the concept of an Intermental Development Zone where the teacher has to engage with the point of view of the student and vice versa in a dialogue out of which open-ended new learning is co-created (Mercer, 2000). Entering into dialogue implies a kind of double-identity or double-voicedness which often looks like an oscillation between two identities over time. To simplify the experience for the sake of clarity: In the moment of speaking I identify as one voice within the dialogue, and in the moment of listening I identify with the dialogue as a whole.This is not only true of face-to-face dialogues but of dialogues at every level including, for example, long-term cultural dialogues such as the dialogue of science.When I send a new article for review by a journal I identify with that article and the specific contribution that it makes to the field, but when I review articles sent to me by a journal I identify with the field of science that the journal represents, and I ask what contribution does this article make to the dialogue so far within that field. The double identity or double-voicedness required of dialogue takes on a new and interesting form in Internet-mediated dialogues. The Internet supports a new kind of educational dialogue supporting peer-to-peer learning. Someone has a problem, types their problem into a search engine and finds a previous exchange on an Internet forum that provides a solution to the problem. Such searches easily lead not only to vicarious participation in other people’s past exchanges but also to becoming drawn into participation in an ongoing shared inquiry. This new form of educational dialogue brings out universal aspects of educational dialogue. In face-to-face dialogue it is easy to assume that a dialogue is between person A and person B, when in reality, as has been described previously, other invisible non-present voices are also invoked. In Internet-mediated educational dialogue the constitutive role of invisible non-present voices is more evident. Each question is sent out to an unknown horizon. That horizon is often imagined as an online ‘community’ but, except where messages are exchanged in closed sites, what is meant by ‘community’ has no clear boundary. Each response comes back from that horizon giving the ‘community’ an apparent concrete form, but really it remains as nebulous as an electron cloud. Behind the specific voices of the respondent and the imagined form of the online community lies the Internet itself. The Internet is unbounded and constantly expanding. In asking questions of the Internet the idea of the Infinite Other takes on form and becomes a concrete dialogue partner. In every kind of dialogue, whether face-to-face dialogue, Internet-mediated dialogue or the long-term cultural dialogue of science, learning occurs only when other voices are allowed to enter into us and change us from within. We can learn from dialogues only because, in a dialogue, we, to some extent, are led to identify with both sides. Every dialogue has the structure of having several different perspectives held together around a gap of difference. This gap of difference is essential to how dialogues work to generate new meaning. New meaning emerges as a co-creation or co-authoring out of the creative tension that is the gap of difference within dialogues. The dialogic gap operates like a hinge around which we can switch perspectives to

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see as if from another point of view, not only that of specific others but also that of Generalised Others and the ‘witness’ voice or perspective of the ‘Infinite Other’.

A dialogic theory of what to teach and how to teach Understanding how children and students learn has implications for a theory of teaching, both how we should teach to support learning and also what kinds of dispositions and identities we should promote through our teaching. Some responses of dialogic theory to the question of what we should teach and the question of how we should teach it are outlined as follows.

Teach dialogue as an end in itself Dialogue is usually taken as part of the ‘how’ of teaching rather than an answer to the question ‘what should we teach?’. Dialogic education turns this around and says that dialogue, as an end in itself, is one of the most important, perhaps the most important, objective of education. Students can be taught to be better at dialogue. Being better at dialogue means learning how to ask better questions, how to listen better, hearing not only the words but also the implicit meanings, how to be open to new possibilities and new perspectives while, of course, learning how to think critically about new perspectives through comparing different points of view. More than all these specific skills, it means being someone who enjoys dialogue and who is open-minded enough to try to understand new perspectives and to try to see things both in ways that others see them and in any new ways that they could possibly be seen. In brief: To be more dialogic means to be more open to learning. There is good evidence that children and students of every kind can be taught to be better at dialogue and that their thinking and their learning improves as a result (Resnick, Asterhan, Clarke & Schantz, 2018). Some other chapters in this handbook say more about how that can be done and also more about the evidence for success in teaching dialogue.

Teach ‘the dialogue so far’ If you arrive late at a meeting where people have been working together on a problem it would probably not be very polite or very useful to immediately share your views. Most likely it would be wiser to listen for a while in order to find out what has been said already, what the key issues are and so to figure out how you might most usefully contribute. Shared cultural knowledge, knowledge of natural science, history, mathematics and so on, is carried within dialogues some of which have been going on for thousands of years. Children cannot be expected to reproduce all of this knowledge for themselves through their own enquiries. Teachers have a useful role in summarising and sharing the dialogue so far so that late-comers can catch up. This is similar to the traditional view of education as the transmission of cultural knowledge across generations. The main difference with a dialogic approach is that knowledge should not simply be transmitted but should be taught as participation in an ongoing and open-ended shared inquiry. Dialogues go on at many levels. As well as short-term face-to-face dialogues there are longterm cultural dialogues. Oakeshott (1960) argues that all of these long-term cultural dialogues connect together in one single global ‘conversation of mankind’ or dialogue of humanity. Teaching the dialogue so far in a way that gives students access to participation in this ongoing global dialogue of humanity is in fact just another way of teaching dialogue as an end in itself. 20

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Teach participation in living dialogues When Oakeshott wrote about a conversation of mankind beginning in the primeval forests he did not mention that the only parts of such conversations that are part of education are those that had been written down. The words of Socrates, an oral thinker, are still discussed because they were written down by his student, Plato. This unacknowledged reliance on the technology of writing shapes Oakeshott’s theory of education in other ways. Oakeshott describes education largely in terms of a dialogue with the past, writing about giving children access to their ‘inheritance’. The speed of knowledge generation and sharing in the print age was, by comparison with the Internet Age, very slow. Now the dialogue of mankind that Oakeshott refers to is being lived out in real time on the Internet. Rather than focussing on transmitting the knowledge of the past, education can now focus on inducting students into participation in knowledge constructing dialogues in the present. It is possible to engage students in cutting edge debates in every area using online videos of talks, following Twitter accounts or by participating more directly in citizen science projects mediated by the Internet (Bonney et al., 2009).

Expand dialogic space(s) The kind of talk moves promoted in dialogic education usually includes asking open questions such as ‘why do you think that?’. Investigating how such talk moves actually function in collaborative group works found that it is probably not right to conceptualise them as if they were positive tools aiding the co-construction of new meaning since they usually work in a more indirect way to open a space for the diffractive resonance of multiple voices out of which a creative response might (or might not) emerge. Opening a dialogic space begins with a relationship within which it is possible to shape the attention of the other. The opening teacher move, or peer move, is drawing attention to unknowing by asking a question or posing a challenge. In some cases, this is drawing students into dialogue about immediately present objects or issues, but in others it might be helping to graft them onto long-term dialogues of the culture so as to ask questions within a tradition, questions that continue that tradition and take it further. Widening the space is asking everyone what they think and also actively seeking out a range of views perhaps by going to the Internet to find alternatives and to invite in different voices. Deepening the space is questioning the frame that has been assumed up to now, asking ‘what are the assumptions that we have taken for granted? Are we sure that they are right? Could the whole area or issue be seen differently?’. A deepening move that I have exemplified in this chapter, for example, is that of asking: ‘is everything we now think about education shaped by print literacy?’, prompting an exploration of what education was like before print literacy and where there is no print literacy in order to see if our theories of education can apply equally in that expanded context. Dialogues occur in time as well as space, and they create their own sense of time as well as their own sense of space. Bakhtin uses the concept of a ‘chronotope’ (literally time–space). Education implies the expansion of dialogic time as well as the expansion of dialogic space. Focussing on the dimension of time can help clarify important aspects of dialogic education. When Vygotsky described the role of the teacher in the ZPD as bridging between the spontaneous concepts of the child and the concepts of the culture he is talking about linking different chronotopes. The time–space of the dialogue of science extends over thousands of years and is global in reach. The role of the science teacher in the classroom is to weave together the very large time–space perspective of science with the smaller and narrower time–space perspective 21

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of a face-to-face dialogue with a child in a classroom. The same general point could be made about other long-term dialogues of culture and, indeed, about culture as a whole understood, with Oakeshott, as a single dialogue or ‘the conversation of mankind’.

Teach the future The movement for teaching ‘21st Century skills’ claims that rapid technological change is making much past knowledge irrelevant such that education needs to switch its focus from transmitting the knowledge of the past to helping students prepare for the future. Interestingly the new ‘skills’ proposed for the 21st Century, the ‘4 Cs’ of collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking, are all aspects of dialogue (Wegerif, 2018). Learning to learn together (L2L2) with new technology has been put forward as perhaps the core complex competence required for the future (Wegerif, 2015). As the actual 21st Century progresses a new term needs to be found for the kind of education being referred to. Increasingly this new term is ‘Education for the Future’ or more simply ‘Future Education’. The recent Worldwide Educating for the Future Index (https://yidanprize. org/the-worldwide-educating-for-the-future-index/) focuses on defining and recording such education in order to compare different countries. This index, quite rightly, includes education for the kind of values that we need for survival and flourishing in the future. The values they include such as global citizenship, open-mindedness, empathy and tolerance of difference are related to the values implicit in dialogic education. Values and an orientation towards creating the future together are inevitably part of dialogic education. There is a simple contrast at the heart of dialogic education: A contrast between accepting a claim as true on the default basis of who has the most power (Bakhtin’s authoritative talk) and the dialogic alternative of truth emerging from the play of free and open debate (Bakhtin’s internally persuasive talk).The dialogic value that it is better to solve disputes through dialogue rather than force is pragmatically sensible if we want students not only to survive the future but also to thrive in the future. Helping to push the world towards a global dialogic democracy of the future is always an aspect of dialogic education, whether this political aim remains implicit or is acknowledged and promoted explicitly.

Dialogic teaching needs to be done dialogically Freire, the first to advance an explicitly dialogic theory of education (1968/2005), stresses the importance of teaching in a way that engages and empowers students, encouraging and supporting them as they find their own words to name the world. Freire’s concern with empowerment and inclusion is continued today in most dialogic education approaches. It is perhaps most exemplified in the dialogic learning approach developed in Spain by Ramon Flecha and his team. Their ‘circles of learning’ approach goes beyond schools to include members of the wider community in educational dialogue groups where the members all support and encourage each other (Flecha, 2000).This is a version of the community of inquiry approach widely used in philosophy for children, where students and their teacher or teachers sit around in a circle to discuss topics together in an open-ended way. Respect for the diversity of student voices is a key component of dialogic education. Even when a shared curriculum is being taught and learnt, dialogic theory claims that each act of learning is creative which means that each individual learner will learn in their own way such that what they learn can empower them in their own unique life context. Some argue that teaching in areas of the curriculum with right and wrong answers like mathematics and the physical sciences is different from teaching in areas like philosophy 22

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where there can be more debate between views (Sfard, Chapter 7 in this volume). It is true that some difference in pedagogy is required if the objective is for students to end up knowing a correct way as opposed to where the objective is to explore the range of ways. However, these different objectives and associated pedagogies can both be valued and combined in any subject area (Scott, Mortimer & Aguiar, 2006). Ellen Langer’s experiments in what she called ‘mindful education’ suggest that students taught only the right procedures are not able to adapt these and to be creative. Her suggestion is that everything should be taught in the context of a range of perspectives and as emerging from debate (Langer, 2016). This is not to suggest that all points of view are equally valid. It is more to suggest that understanding why one way is better than another (in a context) requires understanding the contrasting views and so requires mastering a dialogic space or dialogic field of debate (Phillipson & Wegerif, 201; Marton & Haggstrom, 2017). The main value of teaching everything as fallible in this way is that it leaves students free to question what they have been taught and to challenge and develop it in the future. Even mathematics procedures can be taught with context and with alternatives in a way that prepares students to become creative mathematical thinkers and not just accurate calculating machines.

Summary and conclusion This chapter proposes a theory of dialogic education in the form of a response to the three big questions of education: How do students learn? What should we teach? And how should we teach it? 1) Students learn through being called out by others into active engagement in ongoing dialogues. 2) We should teach dialogue in various forms including a) face-to-face dialogue with specific others, b) dialogue with generalised cultural voices, c) participation in the unbounded dialogue of humanity and d) dialogue with the Infinite Other. 3) We should teach by building relationships, empowering students and inducting students into active engagement in ongoing dialogues through persuasive rather than authoritative discourse. The theory put forward in this chapter is a response to the challenge to traditional theories of education raised by the Internet Age. The Internet throws everyone into a space of multiplicity and uncertainty that most established theories of education seem ill-equipped to cope with.The Internet also offers new educational affordances that are hard to understand from the point of view of theories of education that reflect the prejudices of print literacy. Dialogic educational theory, inspired by Bakhtin, is different because it gives an important role to non-present cultural voices including, most especially, the role of the witness position in every dialogue. This witness position helps us to see things as if from the outside and so calls us out beyond the horizon of our current prejudices. Recently, as I write this, there have been many stories about the Internet not living up to its educational potential: Stories about the Internet encouraging tribalism and bullying or leading to political populism instead of the kind of careful dialogic and deliberative decision making that we need. These stories should remind us of how the new technology of writing was seen by Socrates as a moral danger (Plato, 360 bce/2005). It helps to understand contemporary mass education as a way of responding both to the danger and to the potential of writing. Through mass education we have tamed and harnessed writing into a medium supporting collective 23

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thinking. The Internet is a major new step in communications technology offering in its turn a threat to social life but also an even greater potential for collective thinking than literacy alone can provide. To tame that new threat and to realise that great potential we need to develop new forms of education. The theory of dialogic education put forward in this chapter suggests that, if we are to adapt in response to the challenge posed by the Internet Age, we need to actively teach children from an early age how to talk together respectfully and effectively so as to be able to learn from each other.The idea is that education then works to carry forward the values, dispositions and dialogic identities developed through face-to-face dialogues on to the larger scale of global dialogues mediated by the Internet.

Notes 1 The word ‘embodiment’ used here, and also in the work of Bakhtin, does not always refer to the flesh. Cultural voices or ‘spirit’ voices are embodied in personalities with characteristics including emotional tone. 2 Tindale brings out the parallels between Bakhtin here and Perelman’s claim that argumentation always needs a concept of a universal audience (Perelman, 1971; Tinsdale, 1999). For Perelman the universal audience was not a merely abstract concept but it actively entered into the construction of arguments.

References Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Baron-Cohen, S. (2011). Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty. London: Penguin/Allen Lane. Bonney, R., Cooper, C. B., Dickinson, J., Kelling, S., Phillips,T., Rosenberg, K.V., & Shirk, J. (2009). Citizen science: A developing tool for expanding science knowledge and scientific literacy. BioScience, 59(11), 977–984. Bråten, S. (1988). Dialogic mind: The infant and the adult in protoconversation. In Carvallo, M. E. (ed.) Nature, Cognition and System I. Theory and Decision Library (Series D: System Theory, Knowledge Engineering and Problem Solving), vol 2. (pp. 187–205). Dordrecht: Springer. Bråten, S. (2003). Participant perception of others’ acts: Virtual otherness in infants and adults. Culture & Psychology, 9(3), 261–276. Butgereit, L. (2007). Math on MXit: Using MXit as a medium for mathematics education. In Meraka INNOVATE Conference for Educators, CSIR, Pretoria, 18–20 April 2007, p. 13. Carey, E., Devine, A., Hill, F., Dowker, A., McLellan, R., & Szucs, D. (2019). Understanding mathematics anxiety: Investigating the experiences of UK primary and secondary school students. doi:10.17863/ CAM.37744 Flecha, R. (2000). Sharing Words:Theory and Practice of Dialogic Learning. Rowman & Littlefield. Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the Oppressed/Paulo Freire. New York and London: Continuum. Gallagher, S. (2012). Neurons, Neonates and Narrative. Moving Ourselves, Moving Others (pp. 167–196). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Goody, J. (1977). The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Hermans, H. J. (2002). The dialogical self as a society of mind: Introduction. Theory & Psychology, 12(2), 147–160. Hobson, R. P.(1998).Theintersubjectivefoundationsofthought. In S. Braten (ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Ontogeny (pp., 283–296). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langer, E. J. (2016). The Power of Mindful Learning. Hachette UK. Littleton, K., Light, P., Joiner, R., Messer, D., & Barnes, P. (1998). Gender, task scenarios and children’s computer-based problem solving. Educational Psychology, 18(3), 327–340. Marton, F., & Häggström, J. (2017). Teaching through variation. In Huang, R. & Li, Y. (eds.) Teaching and Learning Mathematics Through Variation (pp. 389–406). Rotterdam: SensePublishers.

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A theory of education for the Internet Age Matusov, E., & Hayes, R. (2000). Sociocultural critique of Piaget and Vygotsky. New Ideas in Psychology, 18(2–3), 215–239. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society (Vol. 111). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mercer, N. (2000). Words and Minds. Routledge. Oakeshott, M. (1960). The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind. Les Etudes Philosophiques, 15(1), 119–182. Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and Literacy:The Technologizing of The Word. London: Methuen. Perelman, C. (1971).The new rhetoric. In Pragmatics of Natural Languages (pp. 145–149). Dordrecht: Springer. Phillipson, N., & Wegerif, R. (2016). Dialogic Education: Mastering Core Concepts Through Thinking Together. Routledge. Piaget, J. (1970). Genetic Epistemology. New York: Columbia University Press. Plato (360 BCE/2006). Phaedrus (B. Jowett, trans.). Available online at: http://ebooks. adelaide.edu.au/p/ plato/p71phs/ (accessed 31 March 2019). Plato (380 BCE/2006). Meno (B. Jowett, trans.). Available online at: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/ plato/p71phs/ (accessed 31 March 2019). Poster, M. (1995). The Second Media Age. Oxford: Blackwell. Resnick, L. B., Asterhan, C. S., Clarke, S. N., & Schantz, F. (2018). Next generation research in dialogic learning. In Hall, G. E., Quinn, L. F., & Gollnick, D. M. (eds.) The Wiley Handbook of Teaching and Learning (pp. 323–338). Wiley Online. Ritzer, G. (2014). Prosumption: Evolution, revolution, or eternal return of the same? Journal of Consumer Culture, 14(1), 3–24. Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Arauz, R. M., Correa-Chávez, M., & Angelillo, C. (2003). Firsthand learning through intent participation. Annual Review of Psychology, 54(1), 175–203. Romeo, R. R., Leonard, J. A., Robinson, S. T., West, M. R., Mackey, A. P., Rowe, M. L., & Gabrieli, J. D. (2018). Beyond the 30-million-word gap: Children’s conversational exposure is associated with language-related brain function. Psychological Science, 29(5), 700–710. Rommetveit, R. (1992). Outlines of a dialogically based social-cognitive approach to human cognition and communication. In A. Wold (ed.), The Dialogical Alternative:Towards a Theory of Language and Mind. Oslo: Scandanavian Press. Scott, P. H., Mortimer, E. F., & Aguiar, O. G. (2006). The tension between authoritative and dialogic discourse: A fundamental characteristic of meaning making interactions in high school science lessons. Science Education, 90(4), 605–631. Sethna, V., Perry, E., Domoney, J., Iles, J., Psychogiou, L., Rowbotham, N. E., … , & Ramchandani, P. G. (2017). Father–child interactions at 3 months and 24 months: Contributions to children’s cognitive development at 24 months. Infant Mental Health Journal, 38(3), 378–390. Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27(3), 379–423. Simon, M., Tzur, R., Heinz, K., & Kinzel, M. (2004). Explicating a mechanism for conceptual learning: Elaborating the construct of reflective abstraction. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 35, 305–329. Sorce, J. F., Emde, R. N., Campos, J. J., & Klinnert, M. D. (1985). Maternal emotional signaling: Its effect on the visual cliff behavior of 1-year-olds. Developmental Psychology, 21(1), 195. Tindale, C. W. (1999). Arguing for Bakhtin. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, Sic Sat, Amsterdam, pp. 786–790. Toulmin, S. (1990). Cosmopolis:The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: Free Press. Trevarthen, C. (1979). Communication and cooperation in early infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity. Before Speech:The Beginning of Interpersonal Communication, 1, 530–571. Turner,V. (1987). Betwixt and between: The liminal period in rites of passage. In Mahdi, L. C. (ed.) Betwixt and Between: Patterns of Masculine and Feminine Initiation (pp. 3–19). Chicago, IL: Open Court. Ulmer, G. L. (2003). Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. New York: Longman. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). The Collected Works of L. S.Vygotsky.Volume 1. Problems of General Psychology. Including the Volume Thinking and Speech (N. Minick, ed. and trans.). New York: Plenum Press. Walkerdine, V. (1990). Mastery of Reason: Cognitive Development and the Production of Rationality. London: Routledge. Wegerif, R. (1999). Two models of reason in education. The School Field, 9(3–4), 77–107. Wegerif, R. (2005). Reason and creativity in classroom dialogues. Language and Education, 19(3), 223–238. Wegerif, R. (2013). Dialogic: Education for the Internet Age. London and New York: Routledge.

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Rupert Wegerif Wegerif, R. (2015). Technology and teaching thinking: Why a dialogic approach is needed for the twentyfirst century. In Wegerif, R., Kaufman, J., & Li, L. (eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Teaching Thinking (pp. 451–464). Oxford: Routledge. Wegerif, R. (2018). A dialogic theory of teaching thinking. In Kerslake, L. & Wegerif, R. (eds.) Theory of Teaching Thinking (pp. 101–116). Oxford: Routledge. Wertsch, J.V. (1991). Voices of the Mind. New York: Harvester. Wertsch, J. V. (2013). The role of abstract rationality in Vygotsky’s image of mind. In A. Tryphon & J.Vonèche (eds.), Piaget Vygotsky (pp. 33–52). New York: Psychology Press. Žižek, S. (2011). A plea for ethical violence. The Bible and Critical Theory, 1(1), 1–15.

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2 DIALOGISM AND EDUCATION David Skidmore

Introduction: What is dialogism? This chapter will review a selection of the key concepts involved in dialogism as a social theory of language and discuss the ramifications of these ideas for education in general and pedagogy in particular. Dialogism is a philosophy of language which places central importance on the reality of socio-verbal interaction in understanding the kind of phenomenon that language is. It is most associated with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), a Russian literary scholar, though important aspects of the theoretical perspective find their most fully developed statements in the writings of other members of the Bakhtin Circle (Brandist, 2002). According to this outlook, before it is anything else, language is a tool for communication. Every concrete instance of language use involves an address to some other participant in the act of communication, whether that be a friend, partner or work colleague to whom we are speaking directly in a face-to-face encounter or the implicit readership of a written text that might have been set down centuries ago by an unknown hand. Many scholars have explored the significance of these ideas in the field of education since the 1990s. Ground-breaking work includes that of Nystrand and Wells (Nystrand, 1997; Wells, 1999). Concerted attempts to tease out their implications for classroom discourse and teacher– pupil talk were made by authors such as Alexander, Cazden and Mercer (Alexander, 2004; Cazden, 2001; Mercer & Littleton, 2007).Their connection with disciplinary learning in specific areas of the curriculum has also received attention (Mercer,Wegerif, & Dawes, 1999).Wegerif, in particular, has advanced the concept of ‘dialogic space’ (Wegerif & Major, 2019), within which new meaning can be developed in educational settings, given an appropriate orientation towards dialogue with learners on the part of the teacher. Acknowledging the usefulness of this perspective, I wish here to build on and develop the concept by envisaging the dimensions along which such a space might be structured, by drawing on key aspects of the dialogic theory of language developed by the Bakhtin Circle and modelling how they may be viewed in relation to one another, as illustrated in Figure 2.1 (the ‘sphere of dialogue’). This shows how the potential for joint semiotic activity is organised along three axes that collectively organise the social space we inhabit when entering into dialogue with one another, determining the possibility for constructing mutual understanding and collaborative practice to be developed.

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David Skidmore Dialogic

Homophonic Addressivity

Permeability

Orthoglossic

Heteroglossic

Voicing

Polyphonic Monologic

Figure 2.1 The sphere of dialogue.

The three dimensions of the sphere of dialogue identified in this model are: 1. Addressivity, defined by Bakhtin as ‘the quality of turning to someone’, which he posits as ‘a constitutive feature of the utterance’ (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 99). I suggest that, in any particular exchange of speech, this dimension can be seen as varying between the poles of a dialogic mode of address, in which the presence of a particular interlocutor is integral to the way in which utterances are articulated, and at the opposite pole, a monologic mode of address, in which an authoritative speaker holds the floor and others are treated as an anonymous audience for his/her speech. Everyday conversation between peers is frequently highly dialogic in this sense, since utterances are typically shaped so as to invite a response from other participants, and it is understood that anyone may contribute to the unfolding exchange of talk throughout its duration. A typical university lecture, on the other hand, exemplifies the monologic mode of address, since it is common for one speaker, who occupies a privileged position as far as talking rights are concerned, to speak without interruption for perhaps an hour, while a body of students attends as listeners, who are not normally expected to volunteer comments while the lecture is in progress and are usually treated as a homogenous group of recipients for the knowledge dispensed by the lecturer. 2. A related but distinct dimension of the sphere of dialogue is what I have called its ‘voicing’. This can vary between the poles of polyphony and homophony, as identified in the model. Bakhtin’s concept of polyphonic speech is discussed further in the Section “Manyvoicedness: Polyphony” of this chapter; he defines it in terms of a ‘plurality of independent voices’ (Bakhtin, 1929/1984).This can be illustrated through how turn-taking is managed in a given speech genre. In small group work among students in the classroom, for example, group members are encouraged to participate collectively in the learning activity set by the teacher; ideally, everyone is expected to contribute to the discussion and to be given a chance to voice their opinion on the problem or topic at issue. If there is disagreement about the solution, the teacher will encourage groups to try and resolve this through informed discussion that draws 28

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on concepts and ideas that have been introduced during the lesson or on a previous occasion. When students work well together in this way, it constitutes a good example of polyphonic (‘many-voiced’) discourse. In contrast, turn-taking and the right to ask questions is handled very differently in formal settings such as law courts. Talk here is not monologic in the sense that a university lecture is: It is expected that a witness or defendant will speak by responding to questions, perhaps at some length. But it is clear that participants in a trial have different positions of authority within the event: A lawyer has the right to pose questions to the witness, not the other way round, and the judge has the ultimate power to rule a certain line of argument or evidence in or out of order. Less formally, plenary discussion led by the teacher in a classroom may exhibit similar characteristics: It has a dialogic form, since the teacher will call on many different students to answer his/her questions, but it is homophonic in the sense that their contributions are orchestrated by the teacher’s management of the discussion. It is the teacher who controls the flow of the talk and allocates the right to talk to the next student contributor, often by name; although there may be many contributors to a particular exchange sequence, the direction, duration and topic of discussion are under the control of one dominant voice, the teacher’s. This may be pedagogically desirable in the course of whole-class discussion; we are simply pointing out that learners occupy a different position in the joint construction of understanding in this situation compared with the polyphonic practice of small group discussion. Plenary whole-class discussion led by the teacher is homophonic in the sense that different voices are not on an equal footing: The teacher holds the power to allocate the right of other participants to speak. 3. The final dimension of the sphere of dialogue that I have identified is its semantic permeability, which may vary between the poles of heteroglossic and orthoglossic forms of speech. Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1934–1935/1981) is discussed at greater length in the Section “Different-languagedness: Heteroglossia” of this chapter; he defines it as the ‘social diversity of speech types’ or the ‘internal stratification’ of a national language such as Russian or English into many different ways of speaking associated with different social groups and activities.This linguistic diversity is a reality of any society with a complex division of labour and social structure; it is also a dynamic, changing reality, as can be seen for example in the way that young people adopt styles of speaking and communicating that differ from those of their parents, in a continuous struggle to differentiate themselves from previous generations. Against this reality of continuous linguistic change, we come across the ideology of using the ‘correct’ language, which I have termed orthoglossia, as seen in attempts to resist new usages for existing vocabulary and insistence on adherence to the norms of ‘standard English’, whatever the context of communication. In formal education, this tension is of particular interest, since teaching of necessity involves the introduction of new concepts and ways of thinking that depart from linguistic practice in everyday, informal settings. Students may need to learn to use a familiar term, such as ‘energy’, in a more precisely defined way (in the science curriculum, for example), or they may need to learn the rules of a new linguistic genre, such as the argumentative essay, and understand how these differ from ways of communicating in other genres (such as the norms of communication on social media).The role of the teacher here needs particular skill in providing a bridge between the heteroglot registers of everyday speech and the initially unfamiliar, specialised languages of academic disciplines that require more ‘orthoglossic’ (formal, sanctioned) linguistic practices. Students will often need to be supported in shifting from an everyday understanding of a concept or domain of knowledge to the academic one. In this process, it is not enough to insist on the ‘correct’, but unthinking, use of a particular term or way of speaking. Learners need the opportunity (for example in the setting of small group 29

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discussion) to ‘try out’ new, specialised ways of talking and thinking (the orthoglossia of the discipline), to make connections between these and their everyday knowledge of the world and to experiment and risk mistakes in their developing understanding of the subject, before their competence is formally assessed as correct or incorrect, acceptable or otherwise. There needs to be enough permeability in the language of the classroom to enable students to cross the border between everyday and academic understanding of a subject. In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss these dimensions further, along with cognate concepts found in the theory of dialogism, and illustrate in more detail their significance for the practice of pedagogy in formal educational settings, such as schools, colleges and universities.

Dialogue and creativity The beginnings of the dialogic theory of language can be found in an early article by the Russian linguist Yakubinsky (Yakubinsky & Eskin, 1997). Yakubinsky’s work represents the first attempt to develop a theory of dialogue and dialogic interaction as the basis for the study of language. It predates the work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov on this topic and anticipates many of their most important ideas. In brief,Yakubinsky emphasises the naturalness of dialogue and contrasts this with the artificiality of monologue. He argues that monologue is allied to power and authority, and suggests that it precludes the speaker’s psychological growth, since it does not allow for any response by listeners. In contrast, dialogue is characterised by its constant interruptibility. He points out that during the interval between one utterance and another, a participant in dialogue must simultaneously attend to their interlocutor’s utterance and prepare their response. Yakubinsky’s argument here is particularly salient to the question of the modes of discourse found in education. For example, his distinction between degrees of dialogicality in the forms of speech helps us to recognise how small group discussion in the classroom has some of the spontaneous character of informal conversation but is framed by a definite purpose and scope which are usually set by the teacher. A highly didactic style of pedagogy, on the other hand, such as that found when the teacher cross-examines the class with a sequence of questions designed to test their recall of answers learnt by rote, may have a superficial appearance of dialogue, since there is a real exchange of utterances between different speakers, but this conceals the fact that the sequence of topics, pace of interaction and selection of speakers is wholly vested in the teacher; it thus constitutes a good example of ‘monologic dialogue’ (see Table 2.1). Yakubinsky emphasises the connection between authority and monologic forms of speech, saying, ‘One listens to those who have power or authority’ (Yakubinsky & Eskin, 1923/1997, p. 250). For this reason, the process of monologisation is typically accompanied by ritual and ceremonial ways of behaving (cf. religious ceremony and judicial proceedings as well as business and political meetings). Again, this brings to mind the interaction order of the classroom, where, customarily, the teacher exercises authority over the conduct of discourse by nominating Table 2.1 Dialogicality of pedagogy Discursive form

Monologue

Monologic dialogue

Dialogic monologue

Dialogue

Pedagogic practice

Lecture

Recitation

Teacher-led plenary discussion

Small group discussion

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student speakers, and where for long periods of time, students are expected to listen in silence while the teacher transmits knowledge through extended verbal monologue. Finally, Yakubinsky compares dialogue as realised in spontaneous face-to-face conversation with monologue, whether spoken or written. He notes the condition of constant interruptibility, which is characteristic of speakers’ turns-at-talk in dialogue, and draws attention to the fact that the pace of dialogic speech is faster than the pace typical of monologue (where the speaker does not normally have to worry about being interrupted). In part, this faster rate of speaking is a floor-holding strategy designed to communicate that the speaker’s utterance is not yet finished. In addition, when we act for the time being as the listener in a dialogue, we not only have to attend to and make sense of what the other speaker is saying but also to prepare our response, our next turn-at-talk. The combination of these two circumstances makes for formal simplicity in dialogic utterances in comparison to monologic speech or writing, according to Yakubinsky. To put it simply, under the pressure of immediacy that we experience in conversation, we are usually so concerned to get our message across that we do not have time to worry much about refining its form; it is more important to ‘say the right thing’ than to ‘say the thing right’, i.e. correctly or with the fullness and precision that we look for in written communication. In dialogue, we speak ‘off the cuff ’, with the creativity of spontaneous improvisation, whereas in writing we have time to go over, revise and polish our first attempt to produce something more fixed and permanent.This process of redrafting accounts for the relative compositional complexity of monologue compared with dialogic speech. Yakubinsky’s remarks here recall Barnes’s distinction between exploratory talk and ‘final draft’ talk in education (Barnes, 1992). He offers the following definition of ‘automatic speech’ (Yakubinsky & Eskin, 1923/1997, p. 255): The term speech automatism applies to speech as a simple volitional activity that uses familiar elements. For him, spontaneous, unrehearsed talk that is improvised on the spur of the moment provides the motor that drives language change, through the ad hoc innovations thrown out by speakers to streamline communication. Monologic forms, like the printed word, are by comparison inherently conservative. We might extend this argument to apply to the case of language development and concept formation at the intersubjective level, as well as to the large scale historical phenomenon of language change across a whole society. It may be that the imperfections, slips and tentative locutions characteristic of exploratory talk in small group discussion in the classroom are an important part of creating the attitude of mental permeability that is needed for developmental learning to occur: The sense that one’s mind is open to enquiry in this realm of knowledge.

Speech and consciousness For Voloshinov, the spoken word is an essential accompaniment to all conscious activity. As he puts it (Voloshinov, 1973/1929, p. 13): Individual consciousness is not the architect of the ideological superstructure, but only a tenant lodging in the social edifice of ideological signs. Voloshinov introduces the concept of speech genre, saying that each social group has its repertoire of speech genres. A speech community comprises different classes using the ‘same’ language 31

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to communicate, and because of this, there is a constant struggle for meaning in discursive interaction, a struggle which refracts the economic struggle between social classes. The ideological nature of discourse means that it cannot be treated as a transparent medium for the transmission of value-free knowledge, since differently oriented inflections, associated with different standpoints of different social groups, intersect within the verbal sign. At the same time, it is just this struggle for inflection, what Voloshinov terms the ‘multiaccentuality’ of discourse, which imparts vitality and dynamism to a living language. Voloshinov proceeds to analyse in more detail the nature of verbal interaction in the exchange of utterances between speakers. He posits as a distinctive feature of the utterance the important concept of evaluative accent: Every utterance, he argues, conveys a value judgement, an evaluative orientation towards its referential theme; this evaluation is marked most obviously in speech by intonation and other aspects of prosody. Meaning as created through dialogue is always saturated with such value judgements. Voloshinov connects this with the idea of the ‘evaluative purview’ of a social group, i.e. the things which have importance for members of that group; this purview is generated through the process of ideological struggle. Historical changes in linguistic meaning can thus be seen as a matter of re-evaluation. Because the society that comprises a speech community is stratified and therefore conflictual,Voloshinov argues that meaning is never settled and fixed once and for all but rather that there is a ‘constant struggle of accents in each semantic sector of existence’ (Voloshinov, 1973/1929, p. 106). The preceding theoretical discussion of the nature of language allows Voloshinov to put forward the following general definition (Voloshinov, 1973/1929, p. 98): Language is a continuous generative process implemented in the social-verbal interaction of speakers. Voloshinov’s outlook leads him to see the act of understanding another as fundamentally dialogic in nature, i.e. as an active, responsive process in which we attempt to match a speaker’s utterance with our own ‘counter-utterance’. He sums this up with a telling analogy (Voloshinov, 1973/1929, pp. 102–103): Meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex. It is like an electric spark that occurs only when two different terminals are hooked together. As far as pedagogy is concerned, Voloshinov’s analysis of the ideological nature of different speech genres anticipates later insights into the nature of teacher-dominated classroom discourse, for example in the work of Mehan and Cazden, who demonstrated that one of the prime lessons that students must learn when they go to school is the nature of the classroom interaction order and the authority of the teacher to control turn-taking and the selection of topics for discussion, and to evaluate the adequacy of student contributions (Cazden, 2001; Mehan, 1979). His emphasis on understanding as a fundamentally dialogic act, embodied in his metaphor of the electric spark, is illuminating for the theory of pedagogy. Adapting this metaphor, we can say that pedagogy can only be considered successful when it elicits that leap of semiotic charge between the teacher and learner; when, in other words, students are potentiated as a result of the act of teaching and their capacity for engaging in conceptually mediated activity is enhanced through the deliberate process of education.

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Different-languagedness: Heteroglossia Bakhtin first introduces and expounds the concept of heteroglossia in his long essay written in 1934–1935, Discourse in the Novel (Bakhtin, 1934–1935/1981). He glosses the term as referring to ‘the social diversity of speech types’, providing the following fuller definition (Bakhtin, 1934–1935/1981, pp. 262–263): The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behaviour, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions … this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre. Important to Bakhtin’s definition is the recognition that linguistic diversity is socio-ideological in nature. For example, there are certain ways of speaking that are ‘part of the job’ in particular professions and occupational groups. It is also true of most formal education settings, as we know from the tradition of classroom discourse research, which has highlighted the way in which lessons in school introduce students not only to subject-specific concepts and vocabulary (e.g. the language of mathematics or history) but also to a given interaction order (Mehan, 1979), in which the teacher typically controls the choice of topic and selection of student speakers and often asks known-answer questions, then evaluates the correctness of a student’s response – a very different pattern of talk from that of informal conversation between peers, or adult–child talk in other social settings. The language of formal education, then, can be seen as a socio-ideological language in Bakhtin’s sense, part of the internal stratification of the national language that forms the medium of instruction (such as English), a sub-type of usage that is employed in this branch of the social division of labour and which differs systematically from modes of communication found in other spheres of activity. The reality of heteroglossia is readily apparent in the internationalised world of higher education in the Anglophone countries, where English may be the medium of instruction – this, indeed, being the attraction for many international students – but where dozens of different first languages may be spoken and heard on the campus of many institutions. This cultural and linguistic and pluralism should not be seen as an educational disadvantage. On the contrary, an awareness of the existence of different language groups and the ‘worlds of meaning’ which they inhabit can help to relativise our own sense of linguistic identity and open our minds to the possibility of alternative ways of seeing the world. Seen in this way, participating in a heteroglot environment is a resource for enlarging and enriching our understanding of ourselves and our relation to others, and our place in the world we share. Bakhtin expresses this thought in a vivid extended metaphor (Bakhtin, 1934–1935/1981, pp. 414–415): Languages of heteroglossia, like mirrors that face each other, each reflecting in its own way a piece, a tiny corner of the world, force us to guess at and grasp for a world behind their mutually reflecting aspects that is broader, more multi-levelled, containing more and varied horizons than would be available to a single language or a single mirror. It is in dialogue with others that our ideological consciousness is formed; as Bakhtin remarks, ‘consciousness awakens to independent ideological life precisely in a world of alien discourses

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surrounding it’ (Bakhtin, 1934–1935/1981, p. 345). This is consequential for the practice of education, since it implies the need for teachers to furnish opportunities for students to engage actively with the conceptual material of the curriculum if they are to take over this knowledge and become capable of making use of it in due course in independent creative ideological activity without the guidance of the teacher. It also indicates that encouraging the practice of collective activity with others (including other students) lies at the heart of a dialogic approach to pedagogy, since through this the learner will engage in the kind of intermental bordercrossing that enables them to transcend the limits of their own current consciousness (Mercer & Littleton, 2007). The other pole of a dialogic approach to pedagogy, as we have already noted, is that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so to speak: The demonstration that students have understood some new concept introduced by the teacher is that they become capable of deploying it to do their own thinking. Bakhtin writes (1934–1935/1981, p. 293): The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his [sic] own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. So long as understanding a concept is equivalent for students to being able to reproduce verbatim the definition printed in a textbook or written on the board by the teacher, the idea remains ‘someone else’s’, not a genuine psychological tool that they can put to useful work. It is only when the learner begins to make use of the new concept in constructing an argument, explaining their point of view or questioning the interpretation put forward by another – including the teacher’s – that we can be confident that they are integrating it into their own emergent understanding of the domain of knowledge they are studying.

Many-voicedness: Polyphony Bakhtin defines the concept of polyphony in the following way (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, p. 6): A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels. In this sense, any act of education has the quality of polyphony, since by definition pedagogy is a form of interactivity, something that happens ‘between various consciousnesses, that is, their interaction and interdependence’ (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, p. 36). Mechanistic views of teaching that see it in terms of the straightforward transmission of accepted knowledge fail to come to grips with this dimension of educative activity, viz. that it necessarily involves an interchange between two or more minded, thinking beings. A dialogic approach to pedagogy, by contrast, recognises that learners have minds of their own and consequently that the teacher must be prepared to talk with (rather than at) her/his students in order to understand their thinking processes, the better to be able to adjust her/his teaching practice so as to lead the development of their consciousness in the desired direction. This kind of intervention may then set up in the mind of the learner what Bakhtin calls a ‘microdialogue’ (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, p. 74), in other words an inner conversation between different voices, one representing their pre-existing knowledge or understanding of the topic in hand, the other the fuller, more developed understanding represented by the voice of the teacher. It seems clear that, in most acts of learning, the learning subject must undergo a more or less extended period of 34

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inner doubt and uncertainty before they reach a new, clearer and more confident understanding of some skill, concept or value that goes beyond their previous level of knowledge or ability. The aim of dialogic pedagogy, then, is to present a model of external dialectic in the interaction between teacher and students that supports the development and appropriation of this relation between the voices of the already-known and the not-yet-understood in the microdialogue of thought in the mind of the learner. In an important passage, Bakhtin spells out the distinction between the atmosphere of ‘monologic’ thought and the dialogic conditions that we have been discussing (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, p. 81): In an environment of philosophical monologism the genuine interaction of consciousnesses is impossible, and thus a genuine dialogue is impossible as well. In essence idealism knows only a single mode of cognitive interaction among consciousnesses: someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error; that is, it is the interaction of a teacher and a pupil, which, it follows, can only be a pedagogical dialogue. The appeal to an analogy with the teacher–pupil relationship is revealing. I do not think we should take Bakhtin to imply that teaching should or must have this monologic quality. Rather, the image suggests that instruction in schools all too often conforms to this stereotype. The idea of ‘pedagogical dialogue’ in fact corresponds closely to the transmission–recitation model of teaching that we have noticed elsewhere still accounts for a great deal of observed classroom practice, according to empirical studies (Alexander, 2001; Galton, Hargreaves, Comber, Wall, & Pell, 1999). The dialogic approach, conversely, endows learners with the ‘fully competent ideological power to mean’ (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, p. 82), recognising that they bring their own ideas to the table when education takes place and that these ideas are a non-zero term in the teaching–learning equation. Whereas monologic modes of teaching tend to stifle thought on the part of learners, treating them as recipients of knowledge to be dispensed by an authority ‘who knows and possesses the truth’, dialogic pedagogy seeks to enlist learners as active participants in the process of knowledge production. This means, of course that the content and sequencing of a lesson conducted in a dialogic fashion cannot be wholly determined in advance. The teacher may have a plan that sets out intended activities and concepts to be covered, but it will be necessary to adjust this as the encounter with a class of learners unfolds, in response to what the teacher learns about the current state of knowledge and understanding that obtains among the group. ‘The idea,’ writes Bakhtin, ‘is a live event, played out at the point of dialogic meeting between two or several consciousnesses’ (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, p. 88). The same might be said of any successful pedagogic interaction; it is not something totally premeditated and predetermined but is the necessarily unpredictable product of the joint activity of more than one consciousness, striving to arrive at an enhanced mutual understanding of the topic being addressed. Pedagogy is a ‘live event’ in much the same sense that the performance of a piece of music is ‘live’: Teaching does not take place in the preparation room, any more than the life of a piece of music resides in the score; both must be brought to life in real-time performance between active human subjects, whose responses to one another shape the totality of their common experience in the moment. Successful teaching necessarily involves an element of improvisation. In contradistinction to the monologic conception of truth embodied in the practice of pedagogical dialogue, as noted previously, Bakhtin defines a processual, enquiry-based and 35

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co-operative conception, which is more in keeping with a dialogic pedagogy (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, p. 110): Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction. Bakhtin goes on to draw a distinction between direct discourse, which is ‘directed exclusively towards its referential object’, and various kinds of ‘double-voiced discourse’ which share a common trait: ‘discourse in them has a two-fold direction – it is directed both toward the referential object of speech, as in ordinary discourse, and toward another’s discourse, toward someone else’s speech’ (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, p. 185). Given this understanding of the double-voiced character of the teacher’s speech, we can see that classroom discourse in dialogic pedagogy is characterised by a conscious sense of ‘addressivity’, to use another term of Bakhtin’s: It is not spoken as if to no-one in particular, or to an anonymous mass, but treats the collective of learners as ‘the subject of an address’ (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, p. 251). The skilled teacher must develop a sense of the particular class or group with whom they are working and of the lesson as a concrete occasion, a unique meeting of voices between this tutor and this set of learners that is taking place right now, in the present moment. Perhaps one of the most important lessons a teacher can pass on is the right to question. Certainly, the classroom atmosphere should not make students ashamed to admit that they do not understand or to ask for further explanation and clarification. This is why pedagogy which relies heavily on a monologic mode of address, which ‘pretends to be the ultimate word’ (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, pp. 292–293), where what the teacher says is right ‘because I say so’, runs the risk of being self-defeating. If we do not give students the opportunity to voice doubt and uncertainty, we have no way of knowing how successful our teaching has been and miss the chance to offer a different explanation or illustration which might dispel any remaining confusion.

Dialogism and education The tradition of dialogism is built on an understanding of language as a practical social activity, something we do to communicate with others in order to co-ordinate collective action. This outlook is particularly important in the sphere of education, since pedagogy is by definition a form of interaction.The praxis of dialogic pedagogy will be strengthened and deepened if it is informed by an understanding of some of the key concepts outlined in this chapter, in particular: 1. the fundamentally dialogic nature of all speech, set against the degrees of dialogicality that characterise different modes of speaking and different social settings; 2. the ideological effect of the interaction order established in the classroom on the developing consciousness of students, an order which the teacher has some power to change and which can vary between the monologic pattern of teacher-led recitation and a more discursive style of teacher–student dialogue which is open to modification by studentinitiated topics; 3. the transitional function of classroom discourse, whose purpose is to support learners in their struggle to comprehend the unfamiliar, transforming themselves and expanding their capacity for joint social action in the process; and 36

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4. the ability of the dialogic teacher to model a dialectic of enquiry, in which the shared search for situated truth in the educational encounter embodies a method for exploring the world as unfinalised and open to development through organised human intervention. By embodying the spirit of collective enquiry in their pedagogic practice, teachers can enable students to develop the ability to join with others in the work of conscious transformation of our social world. We must enter into dialogue with students if we are to change their minds or rather, support them in changing their own minds.

References Alexander, R. J. (2001). Culture and Pedagogy: International Comparisons in Primary Education. Oxford: Blackwell. Alexander, R. J. (2004). Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk. Cambridge: Dialogos. Bakhtin, M. M. (1929/1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson, with an Introduction by Wayne C. Booth (C. Emerson, Trans.). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1934–1935/1981). Discourse in the novel. In M. Holquist (Ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (ed. C. Emerson & M. Holquist, V. W. McGee, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barnes, D. (1992). From Communication to Curriculum (2nd ed.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Brandist, C. (2002). The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics. London: Pluto Press. Cazden, C. B. (2001). Classroom Discourse:The Language of Teaching and Learning (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Galton, M., Hargreaves, L., Comber, C., Wall, D., & Pell, T. (1999). Changes in patterns of teacher interaction in primary classrooms: 1976–96. British Educational Research Journal, 25(1), 23–37. Mehan, H. (1979). Learning Lessons: Social Organisation in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mercer, N., & Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking: A Sociocultural Approach. Abingdon: Routledge. Mercer, N.,Wegerif, R., & Dawes, L. (1999). Children’s talk and the development of reasoning in the classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 25(1), 95–111. Nystrand, M. (1997). Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. Voloshinov,V. N. (1973/1929). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (L. Matejka & I. R. Titunik, Trans.). New York: Seminar Press, Inc. Wegerif, R., & Major, L. (2019). Buber, educational technology, and the expansion of dialogic space. AI & Society, 34(1), 109–119. Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a Sociocultural Practice and Theory of Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yakubinsky, L. P., & Eskin, M. (1923/1997). On dialogic speech. PMLA, 112(2), 243–256.

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3 WHO’S TALKING? (AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR ‘US’?) Provocations for beyond Humanist dialogic pedagogies Kim Davies and Peter Renshaw

Introduction In this contribution, we aim to expand thinking around who can and should count as legitimate, credible and viable relational partners in dialogism by commencing a critical conversation with posthumanism. While we will soon outline what we mean both by ‘dialogism’ and ‘posthumanism’, at this early stage we want to flag that our interest is in what possibilities for self and other/s open up when dialogism and posthumanism are brought into contact and cross-fertilisation along the conceptual boundary of ‘the human’.We foreshadow in our conclusion some of the changes and openings made possible for the field of dialogism itself and dialogical research by this speculative conversation, and we will invite your activist investment in these spaces. Our approach (we hope!) is lively and provocative, along the lines of a thought experiment, although a thought experiment with vital ethical and political parameters, since for both of us, social-and-otherthan-human justice and the transformations required for it are central to the planetary concerns at the heart of our shared and pressing precarity. Our chapter is organised into three main parts. We begin by offering our reading of how ‘the human’ is variously configured by Humanism, dialogism and posthumanism and what these respective versions make intelligible and also as a consequence, effectively dis/allow. Using these readings of ‘the human’ as a conceptual backdrop, we then undertake an empirical exploration of how ‘the human’ plays out in terms of dialogism and posthumanism in our current respective research fields: namely critical disability studies (Kim) and place pedagogies (Peter). Through this empirical investigation, we put dialogical notions of self and other, voice, dialogue with difference and dialogue with the other on the threshold with posthumanism for generative effect. In our concluding part we wrap up our brief encounter with posthumanism by re-calling the radical relationality at the heart of dialogism and projecting its transformation of the subjects and the matterings of and for a beyond Humanist dialogism and dialogic pedagogies.

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Con/figuring ‘the human’ We now undertake our overview of ‘the human’ as it is configured in Humanism, dialogism and posthumanism. Our quick sketch will outline the central ways in which these three ideologies account for human and other/s forms of being and alterity since, by our reading, these ontological foundations determine the ways in which their respective epistemological truth claims unfold. It is from within the parameters of this relationality, as described by dialogism and posthumanism in particular, that we will take up the second and third parts of our chapter. It’s timely, given some of the telling language used in the previous paragraph (e.g.‘truth claims’ and ‘unfold’) to try to map ourselves reflexively within the context of these ideological frameworks and concerns. We identify ourselves as dialogical scholars. Peter draws upon sociocultural theory and practice, especially as it applies to education (Renshaw & Tooth, 2018), and Kim is an early career researcher who appropriated a Bakhtinian orientation to undertake her doctoral research on the sociocultural history of ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’ (Davies, 2016). Peter was also Kim’s PhD advisor, and they have written together using what they call ‘a dialogical approach’ to learning and subjectivity (Davies & Renshaw, 2013). As dialogical scholars, we believe and here acknowledge that the dialogism that is realised in our research (this current project included) is a hybridised discourse where we have taken the words of others and made them our own, following Bakhtin (Bakhtin, 1935), so to speak. We also highlight that as academics we are immersed in a heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1935) of contending discourses and our dialogism – as a living discourse – is actually the way we are speaking ourselves into being, as members of a community of (dialogical) scholars, by taking up the voices of other speakers whose words and meanings we have appropriated and re-voiced for our own intentions (Bakhtin, 1935). Importantly for your reading of this chapter, this includes the Humanist heritage that remains the sedimented bedrock of Western positivist and post-positivist academic expectations and practices as well as the emerging discourse of posthumanism which, in many ways, functions as a centrifugal force destabilising this dominant Humanist authoritative discourse. We also suggest that no ideology is discursively pure and the three that we represent here are already discursively and recursively engaged with each other in significant ways through the various chronotopic gateways (Bakhtin, 1938) that shape all of our meaning-making endeavours. Therefore, our internally persuasive discourse, and the one that you should be alert to as you critically read our work here, is best represented as a dialogism that is mongrelised by its involvement with the all of the discourses at play in our living through current times, which obviously includes the three we have targeted for analysis here. We are not apologising for this predicament, indeed as dialogicians we know it to be inescapable; rather we simply want to draw attention to our imperfect and probably impossible attempts to be critically reflexive about our ideological relationship to the focus of our chapter so that you can read our assessments and assertions with care and attention. We are not suggesting that Humanism, dialogism and posthumanism are generationally successive. No, that would impose an oversimplifying pedigree, structuring logic and linear connection that would obfuscate the messiness of their relational entanglements. But we do draw your attention to their historical and sociocultural contingency and suggest that each is distinctly constituted by and through its relationship/s to the others. As English-speaking scholars currently working in neoliberal universities, Humanism is so much more than our intellectual heritage; it forms the (sometimes literal) architecture of how

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we approach, appraise and make sense of ourselves and our material and sociocultural worlds. It is so much a ‘naturalised’ part of our being-in-the-world that it is astounding that we can distance ourselves sufficiently from ‘Humanism’ to be able to attempt to identity ‘it’ and tease out its effects on our mis/perceptions and mis/understandings of self and others. This particular reflexive exercise is itself an instantiation of our Humanist inheritance since the world that Humanism posits is an anthropocentric one where ‘thought’ can be brought to bear on ‘reality’ to test the veracity and thus the Truthfulness of all manner of hypotheses and other claims. Nature is just a complicated set of patterns – intrinsic, universal, immutable – and humans are the self-appointed pattern readers to decode and make legible not only ‘Nature’ but our own ‘special’ place in it. Typically, we read Nature’s patterns into a narrative that places us at the pinnacle of development, strangely separate from and superior to the world that we study and claim as our own.This Humanist world is a place of clearly demarcated insides and outsides,Truth and falsehoods, animate and inanimate matter organised in a hierarchy from the ‘lowest’ and most ‘primitive’ living forms to the pinnacle of Life itself: the huMan. It is a world where, in dualist mode with his mind split from his body, Man’s cool reason subdues his passionate, embodied senses and Science outweighs belief; a measurable world of compulsive development, viewed as a linear progression from blind (?) ignorance to masterful Enlightenment which will be signified, presumably, by the final, complete and perfect understanding of Everything. It is a knowable world whose secrets are not mysteries, just ‘facts’ awaiting discovery through appropriate empirical testing, verification and peer review. It is a world to be known – by humans – so that its resources, including its human resources, can be put to appropriate productive and profitable use. Individual human enterprise and initiative is the engine driving this perpetual advance, constrained by a morality – again anthropocentric – that occasionally interrupts ‘progress’ with Humanist notions like ‘human rights’, ‘animal welfare’ and ‘social justice’. In our reading of Humanism, ‘self ’ is sameness; alterity is difference, and a distinct gap marks their differentiation. The former brings privilege and comfort; the latter, insecurity and outsidedness and possible exclusion. It is timely to draw down the most significant implications for this Humanist accounting of ‘self ’ and ‘other/s’ as we begin the lead into our outline of dialogism and its theorisations about who counts and how it is that they count as ‘human’. In addition to its anthropocentrism and as a consequence of its origins and geo-political projects and impacts, Humanism is also Eurocentric with normative inscriptions cutting deeply and painfully across its discursive progeny, including the categories of ‘race’, ‘gender’, ‘class’ and ‘ability’. As Braidotti (2013) notes ‘Humanity is very much the male of the species; it is a he’ (p. 24); ‘he is white, European, handsome and able-bodied’ (p. 24); ‘an ideal of bodily perfection’ (p. 13); ‘implicitly assumed to be masculine, white, urbanised, speaking a standard language, heterosexually inscribed in a reproductive unit and a full citizen of a recognised polity’ (p. 65); ‘a rational animal endowed with language’ (p. 15). For critics however, this normative white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied ‘human’ at the heart of Humanism is empty and remains hollow – if relatively secure – by virtue of what it excludes on the other side of its normalising boundaries and through the intended and unintended effects that the Sciences and associated disciplinary professionals (like teachers for example) have when patrolling, policing and patching these ‘normal’ (human) insider and strange (non-or-less-than-human) outsider limits (see Graham & Slee, 2008). Our portrait of Humanism is painted with broad brush strokes and does deserve more detailed elaboration, research we hope to take up as we continue our work with the possibilities for ‘beyond Humanist dialogism’. However, our interest in a productive encounter with posthumanism stems from our concerns that dialogism has become bound by its Humanist threads, understandable as this may be given its emergence as part of the Humanist inher40

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itance and in response to weaknesses with and worries about Humanist theorisation. The dialogism we take up is based upon the intellectual legacy of Bakhtin (1919; 1919–1921; 1922–1924/1977–1978; 1935; 1938; 1952–1953; 1984) and those scholars who have taken up his work and applied it across the humanities and social sciences since its translation from Russian in the latter stages of the twentieth century (e.g. Brandist, 2002; Emerson, 1997; Erdinast-Vulcan, 2013; Holquist, 2002; Morson & Emerson, 1990; Matusov, 2007; Peeren, 2008; Steinby & Klapuri, 2013; Todorov, 1984; White, 2013, among others) For us, the explanatory power and ethico-political appeal of dialogism lies in its de-centring of the human into the context of discursively mediated sociocultural fields, chronotopically governed (Bakhtin, 1938) yet specific and unrepeatable because of their temporal and proximal eventness (Tarulli, 2001, p. 117). It theorises ‘the human’ as an intersubjective accomplishment, unfinalised yet reliant on others for the words that, when voiced, give accountable personhood to the speaker, a being in process of becoming, with no alibi for living (Bakhtin, 1922–1924/1977–1978). For us, this idea/l of ‘the human’ in-and-as-relation is a much-needed balm to the narcissism, myopia and contrived autonomy of the Humanist human. The strongest Humanist thread that dialogism picks up and re-weaves, perhaps naturally enough, is the focus on the human as the instrument of knowledge making. Like Humanism, dialogism also considers itself a scientific and science-making enterprise. Also like Humanism, dialogism begins and ends with ‘the human’ although this dialogical human is very differently located, not floating slightly above the rest of the world but firmly grounded within historicised sociocultural contexts and complicated intersubjective and other relational webs. As a positioned and interdependent being, the dialogical human is also primarily a communicator, agentive in contrast to the cerebral Humanist thinker, relying on language use for participation in the processes of self-and-other making. Alterity is thus fundamental to a dialogical theory of human development; it is embraced – theoretically at least – as the way we come into being ourselves. Within dialogism, different others are not to be feared as a potential threat to our individual sovereignty since they are in fact indispensable to our personhood. With acknowledgement of the centrality of alterity and dialogue with, through and across human differences, comes a particular dialogical sense of accountability for the mutuality of self-making. Dialogical accountability exceeds a Humanist’s reflexivity since it acknowledges through the notion of transgredience (Bakhtin, 1919–1921) that the individual cannot ever have either transparent or complete selfunderstanding and moreover, that such independence is illusory. Significantly and in marked distinction to Humanism, for dialogism, humans do not simply display our pre-formed characteristics to each other when we communicate. Rather, in communication, each person is an actor who is oriented to others so that the distinctive features of utterances (such as tones, genres, lexical choices) are contextspecific choices made from a plethora of possibilities available at that moment. (Davies & Renshaw, 2013, p. 397) The human as it is configured through dialogism is thus not only answerable for their words and deeds but also is part of a mutual process of self-other creation that remains, always, unfinalisable (Bakhtin, 1919). As Markova (2003) concludes ‘To be means to communicate, and to communicate means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself ’ (p. 257). The features of the dialogical human that sets it apart from its Humanist heritage is summarised by Linell as interactionism, contextualism and other-orientation (2010, p. 18). These are the features of dialogism that blur boundaries and extend our horizons beyond individuated Humanist preoccupations and offer, to us, so much promise on the threshold with posthumanism. 41

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We have highlighted the Humanist threads that dialogism has picked out, pulled apart and woven anew in its own distinct configuration of the human. Despite these important elaborations and differences, there do remain fibres that link and bind them: you can pick the family resemblance when we place them side-by-side. The dialogical configuration is still essentially anthropocentric: the huMan – albeit in mutually constitutive relationships – remains at the centre of the dialogical universe and the most significant interrelationships are those between humans. Again, context is a core feature of the dialogical approach to understanding human communication, development and ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1935), but the contexts we investigate as influential are human relational contexts, like ‘culture’, sociolinguistics, classroom interactions and communication patterns. These are undoubtedly vital research and practice concerns, and the contribution of dialogical scholarship in these areas has been outstanding; however, so far there has been very limited take-up by dialogical scholars of the notion of context and interrelationship beyond ‘the human’. It follows, given the privileging of interdependence and contextualisation within dialogism, that communication is a central concern and essential feature of the dialogical human. This is evidenced, for example, by our take-up of ‘the utterance’ as the basic unit of analysis (Bakhtin, 1935) in dialogical research.Yet the communicative models and practices that feature in our research themselves privilege a particular ideal sort of human – the ‘normal’ i.e. able-bodied human. The dialogical communicating human is fundamentally a thinking human, and it seems that the Cartesian duality lingers and our dialogical human is still far from fully and diversely embodied. Despite a very small handful of studies (see Bagatell, 2007; Davies, 2016; Davies & Renshaw, 2013; Good, 2001; Linell, 2009; Linell, 2010; Linell, 2017), dialogism has been largely unconcerned with matters of disability or bodily differences. And this is despite Linell’s assertion that “nowhere it seems easier to demonstrate the relevance of dialogical theory (other-orientation, interaction, contexts) than in communication with persons with disabilities” (2010, p. 25). Cresswell and Teucher’ s (2011) work has prompted us to consider a phenomenological approach to the communicating body in dialogism, an invitation that dialogical scholars have so far not fully explored. He – the human in dialogism – still remains largely ‘male’ since gender, unlike ‘culture’ and ethnicity and even socioeconomic background, is not a prominent focus of dialogical research. In identifying the ways in which the dialogical configuration of ‘the human’ remains constrained by some of its Humanist legacy, we are not wishing for or anticipating a perfect totalising theory of Everything. Rather, we are drawing attention to what we have argued are unnecessary limitations to what dialogical scholars are enabled to research because of how their Humanist inheritance continues to limit conceptualisations of communication, relationality and contextualisation. We wonder if and how the posthuman configuration of ‘the human’ might loosen these ties that bind, and we approach that threshold now. Our outline of the posthuman configuration of ‘the human’ is largely informed by Braidotti (2006; 2011; 2013; 2017), whose work is itself indebted to Deleuze and Guattari (1987) as well as Donna Haraway (1991). Braidotti stretches the notion of human becoming far beyond the unfinalisability of dialogism and its humanist legacies, and we approach this posthumanist threshold aware that for Braidotti (2006), posthumanism is a consciously anti-Humanist and explicitly political project. Indeed she frames her work as the invention of ‘conceptual schemes that allow us to think the unity and the interdependence of the human, the bodily and its historical ‘others’ at the very point in time when these others return to dislocate the foundations of the humanist worldview’ (p. 203). Starting with the body, Braidotti’s human ‘is neither a biological nor sociological category, but an interface, a threshold, a field of intersecting material and symbolic forces; a surface where multiple codes (sex, class, age, race, etc.) are inscribed’ (Goodley & Runswick-Cole, 2013, p. 5) and as such, Braidotti offers a process-oriented political ontology, ‘a self beyond its traditional fixed moorings’ (Goodley, Lawthom, & Runswick-Cole, 2014, p. 346). This process ontology is, 42

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however, located, embodied and intensely relational. Braidotti (2006) describes ‘location’ as ‘a materialist temporal and spatial site of co-production of the subject, and thus anything but an instance of relativism. The politics of location, or situated knowledges, rests on process ontology to posit the primacy of relations over substances’ (p. 199; emphasis added). The human in this formulation is ‘a radically immanent intensive body (in) an assemblage of forces, or flows, intensities and passions that solidify in space, and consolidate in time, within the singular configuration commonly known as an “individual self ”’ (Braidotti, 2006, p. 201). We have a new human emerging here (at least in terms of a Western Humanist tradition) and what Braidotti (2017) herself describes as a convergence of antihumanism, on the one hand, and anti-anthropocentricism, on the other. Antihumanism focuses on the critique of the humanist ideal of “Man” as the universal representative of the human, while anti-anthropocentricism criticises species hierarchy and advances ecological justice. (p. 9) At play here is a transversality, not bound to or by individuated humans, but a nomadic subjectivity of ‘complex, generic singularities, not universal claims … taking place in between nature and technology, male and female, black and white, local and global … in assemblages that flow across and displace the binaries’ (Braidotti, 2017, pp. 11, 12) in what Harraway famously calls ‘naturecultures’ (2003). Thus ends the categorical distinction between life as bios, the prerogative of Anthropos, and the life of animals and nonhumans, or zoë (Braidotti, 2006).What come to the fore instead are new human-nonhuman linkages, which include complex media-technological interfaces of biological and nonbiological matter. The double mediation, bio and info-technological, is of crucial importance to the posthuman predicament. These discourses express not only the critical interrogation of the category of anthropocentricism, or species supremacy, but with it the awareness of the relational structure of the embedded and embodied, extended self. (Braidotti, 2017, pp. 12–13) Braidotti’s posthumanism has its roots in a Spinozist or monist tradition, and this allows her to theorise in non-binary ways, in contrast to the limitations imposed by Cartesian dualism on Humanist and dialogical versions of ‘the human’. But more than this, Braidotti’s new materialism foregrounds the positivity of difference as a process of differential modulation within a common matter … The key notion is that matter … is not organised in terms of dualistic mind/body oppositions, but rather as materially embedded and embodied subjectsin-process … This emphasis on the monistic univocity of life does not deny the power of differences, but rather argues that they are not structured according to the dialectical principle of internal or external opposition, and therefore do not function hierarchically. (Braidotti, 2017, p. 16) Braidotti’s move beyond dialectics and binaries enables not just an egalitarianism among species but invokes a radical relocation of difference as an active process of differing or perhaps 43

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difference-ing that exceeds and replaces the essentialist and fixed tropes of Humanism.This postanthropocentric, beyond-human subjectivity involving ‘multiple ecologies of belonging’ (Braidotti, 2017, p. 17) requires also a beyond-human ethics of ‘compassionate co-construction of transversal subjectivity’ (Braidotti, 2017, p. 17). Braidotti (2006) describes this beyond-human ethics as concerning the ‘creation of a new kinship system: a new social nexus and new forms of social connection with these techno-others. (She asks) what kinds of bonds can be established and how can they be sustained?’ (p. 202). This profound transversal interdependence ‘anchors the subject in an ethical bond to alterity’ (Goodley et al., 2014, p. 353) where codependence is affirmed as enhancing ‘because an ethics based on the primacy of the relation of interdependence values life in itself ’ (Braidotti, 2013, p. 95; emphasis added).This is a momentous expansion beyond dialogism’s transgredience (Bakhtin, 1919–1921), but it does indicate some of the ways in which aspects of Braidotti’s posthumanism are nascent within Bakhtinian theorisations and why we believe conversations on this threshold can be so generative, for dialogical pedagogies in particular. Braidotti’s posthuman configuration of ‘the human’ gifts an intense affinity through affective connection with all of life. She pleads for an ‘affirmative politics grounded in immanent interconnections … (bound) by the compassionate acknowledgement of interdependence with multiple others most of which, in the age of the Anthropocene, are not anthropomorphic’ (Braidotti, 2017, p. 22). Braidotti’s post-human is in some ways a logical extension of the dialogical self, located but mobile, unfixed and unfinalised, accountable and ethically responsible through the processes of co-agency and co-being for communal processes of shared becoming and mutual enhancement. The main difference, from our reading of both configurations, is that for Braidotti (and perhaps all of us) it is time to move beyond human concerns. We will explore some of these implications for a renewed dialogism in our next section where we dip into our empirical research.

Empirical explorations It’s time now to take these various con/figurations of the human and use them as theoretical resources in a couple of different empirical research contexts. Kim will explore anew the selfmaking work at WrongPlanet.net and how posthumanism extends the insights afforded through a dialogical reading, and then Peter will consider how his work with place-based pedagogies has been expanded and made richer through its engagement with posthumanism.

Who’s Talking @ WrongPlanet.net? (Kim) WrongPlanet.net is described as ‘an online community for individuals with Autism and Asperger Syndrome (AS).The site was started in 2004 … and includes a chat room, a large forum, a dating section and articles describing how to deal with daily issues’ (Wikipedia.com retrieved January 22, 2010). I will briefly revisit a series of comments to the Adolescent forum thread ‘Why is aspergers such a negative thing?’ posted between March and September 2007 to show how my understanding of this self-making work can be diffracted in useful ways through contact with posthumanism to make a fuller dialogical account. In my PhD research I explored how the posters to this thread came together and through their posts about their different identifications with and experiences of ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’ formed a momentary, virtual community of not just mutual support but mutual subjectification through the transitory materialisation of their versions of ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’. I understood these events at the time in dialogical terms as a process of ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1935) where some of the posters adopted as an authoritative discourse a medical model of AS as a disability and spoke themselves into being as someone with or having Asperger’s Syndrome. For example when Kilroy posts that ‘personally 44

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I think it’s terrible because it’s alienated me from the world the world doesn’t want me and I despretly want to fit in I keep saying how much I hate my AS and wish it would go away’. Other posters however identified themselves as being ‘aspies’ taking this same medical diagnosis and reworking it into a different, neurodiverse way of being in the world, transforming it into a source of affirmation, distinction and self-respect, a way of staking an ontoepistemologic claim against normal, neurotypical ‘others’. These posters embraced the classic triad of autistic impairments not as deficits or disordered genetics but as core components of healthy personalities, including these attributes ‘positively different’ (Topher); ‘successful’ and ‘similar to Einstein’ (jaydog); ‘special’ (1Orx2); ‘achieving against the odds’ and ‘amazing’ (mutti). At the time, I thought this was a novel and fruitful reading but having spent some time on the posthuman threshold I realise just how much I missed by limiting my analysis to a Cartesian-bound, discursive reading of these posts. I missed reading the posters and recognising the technohuman assemblages that they were, by virtue of their be-coming together through these online encounters. I acknowledged at the time, in a standard dialogical way, the affordances of the Internet, but I missed that the World Wide Web was not a technical convenience, it was these posters and their AS, with them, of them, as them and not separate. I also missed the phenomenological nature of this assemblage by focussing exclusively on the discursive analysis of the various synchronous posts.The Internet was these posters and their embodiments of their AS for the duration of their online encounters and for this period of time they became technohumans, hooked into a virtual world through a web of wonderful networks. These diffractions do not override the previous dialogical conclusions, rather they enrich the Bakhtinian analysis by moving the Humanist human beyond its dialogical tethers and releasing it into a new world of mobility, multiplicity, experimentation and affirmative embodied alterity. I remember being concerned at the time by how ‘vulnerable’ the posters were to the clinical gaze. Now I am more respectful and more concerned about the epistemic violence that issues from a researcher’s normative Humanist arrogance: disability crips what it means to be human and has ‘the radical potential to trouble the normative, rational, independent, autonomous subject that is so often imagined when the human is invoked’ (Goodley & Runswick-Cole, 2016, p. 2). Being non-normative ‘is not a tragedy but a possibility, an affirmation, a “queer” or “crip” space for rethinking what it means to be human, to live a quality life and a life with quality’ (Goodley et al., 2014, p. 348). It also means starting to hear some home truths about what it means to be ‘normal’, to be held to account and to ask ‘Who’s talking here and what does it mean for “us”?’

Who’s talking about place? (Peter) Place pedagogy provided me (Peter) the space to begin rethinking dialogism (see Renshaw, 2017) and the humanist assumptions that have tethered it narrowly to human–human relations rather than to an encompassing relationality that entangles humans with the more-than-human world (Braidotti, 2013). Notions of ‘Nature’ arising from humanism have separated ‘the human’ from the natural world and positioned humans as stewards and rulers of that world. Nature, as the non-human ‘other’, is subservient to the interests of humans and available to be exploited to satisfy human needs. Nature, known through Science, is managed through technologies that increase its utility for capitalist exploitation and profit – ‘cheap nature’ (Moore, 2015, p. 17). The consequences of this humanist ideology are being felt currently in our precarious epoch, the Anthropocene, characterised by unprecedented extinction of species, habitat destruction and escalating climate change (Brennan, 2017; Harraway, 2015). Clearly, this separate and exploitative notion of place derived from Humanism could not provide the basis of a pedagogy designed to connect children to the more-than-human world. 45

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But dialogism with its relational framing of self and other as “human” also didn’t offer a clear way forward to rethink the relationship between Nature and humans. It offered what Snaza et al. (2014) have described as a ‘resolutely humanist’ framing of how we ‘relate to animals and things’ (p. 40). As a dialogic scholar, I proposed (Renshaw, 2017) that we need to extend the notion of the ‘dialogic other’ beyond the human sphere to the more-than-human-world. Indigenous peoples have long conceived of their selves as intricately related to place, and many Indigenous cultural practices entail dialoguing with the more-than-human-world in specific places (Somerville, 2010; Tuck & McKenzie, 2014). Various efforts are being made by posthumanist researchers and educators to draw children into a sensuous and empathetic openness to the more-than-human world, where the ‘other’ is noticed, listened to, loved, cared for and appreciated aesthetically (Cutter-Mackenzie & Edwards, 2013; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). In theorising an alternative place pedagogy with my colleague Ron Tooth (Renshaw & Tooth, 2019), we were drawn to the work of Margaret Somerville (2010) who drew upon her long partnership with Indigenous women as co-researchers to theorise place as storied, embodied and contested but above all as relational. This Indigenous sensibility to place precedes the formulation of postmodernist ontologies and epistemologies but provides a parallel and highly authentic basis for designing place-responsive pedagogy that entangles students with the morethan-human world. We were also influenced by Bill Neidjie, an Indigenous elder who devised a pronoun ‘e’ to reference the flattened ontologies fundamental to Indigenous relationships with ‘Nature’. Not ‘I and thou’, but ‘I and e’. Morrissey (2015) commented on Bill Neidjie’s way of speaking about human–Nature relations: The use of the pronoun ‘e’ means that an equal subjecthood is attributed to male and female, flora and fauna, natural phenomena and ancestral beings. This simple but refined linguistic economy (e) is perfectly adequate to the task of representing the reciprocal and transparent interrelationships of birds, animals, humans, trees, and ancestral beings. (p. 6) Our research (Tooth & Renshaw, 2019) on children’s accounts of their experiences during the place-responsive pedagogy revealed evidence of their entangled sense of relationality and emotional connectedness to the more-than-human world. We noted changes in the children’s sense of bonding with ‘Nature’ and becoming part of ‘Nature’ (‘I feel as if I’m a part of the environment’), as well as a changed view of ‘Nature’ itself where agency and knowledge are represented as simultaneously part of the human and the more-than-human world (‘Nature talks to me and it has so many stories to tell’). Children reported a sense of solidarity with ‘Nature’ that motivated them to speak-up for ‘Nature’ (‘I learnt that a group of people can save a whole forest it is truly stunning’). Across their accounts, an emotionally attuned sensibility to the more-than-human world was evident. And a sense of sharing life with e, as one child wrote, I think the most important discovery I made today was we’re not the only living things that live on the earth (Tooth & Renshaw, 2019).

Conclusion This is where we end our brief encounter on the threshold with posthumanism. We wonder what you make of the virtues (and not merely the research merits) of loosening the Humanist ties that bind dialogism to Cartesian notions, normative human-only bodies and binary oppositions? We hope you are now interested, like us, in a re-newal of dialogism’s radical relational-

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ity and a resurgent radical engagement with otherness – a beyond-Humanist otherness and a beyond-human otherness too. We can only imagine what differences dialogic pedagogies that embrace and are informed by posthumanism might make to our capacities and commitments to share our world justly, with a loving and careful attentiveness. The next and not last word goes to Stetsenko (2007) who urges us all in this ethical, activist and transformative project of a ‘relational ontology coupled with the centrality of alterity’ (p. 750). She writes Both dialogicality and answerability are intricately connected … because each and every act or deed inevitably connects the person with other people, comes out of a life of commitment and embodies this commitment, changing forever the whole dynamic of one’s life and that of other people too, through each and every deed. In this sense becoming-through-doing conveys acknowledgement of one’s participation in the world, one’s “non-alibi in it” … Therefore it is one’s responsibility (or answerability) to be aware of the impact that each and every act or deed carries for both the present and the future, for the totality of one’s life and one’s lifeworld, and in light of one’s interconnectedness with others, for other people too. (Stetsenko, 2007, pp. 754–755)

References Bagatell, N. (2007). Orchestrating voices: Autism, identity and the power of discourse. Disability & Society, 22(4), 413–426. Bakhtin, M.M. (1919). Art and answerability. Translated by V. Liapunov. In M. Holquist & V. Liapunov (1990) (Eds.), Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin (pp. 1–3). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1919–1921). Towards a philosophy of the act. Translated with notes by V. Liapunov. In V. Liapunov & M. Holquist (1993) (Eds.), Towards a Philosophy of the Act. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1922–1924/1977–1978). Author and hero in aesthetic activity.Translated by V. Liapunov. In M. Holquist & V. Liapunov (1990) (Eds.), Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin (pp. 4–256). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1935). Discourse in the novel. Translated by C. Emerson & M. Holquist. In M. Holquist (1981) (Ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (pp. 259–422). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1938). Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel. Translated by C. Emerson & M. Holquist (1981). In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (pp. 84–242). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1952–1953). The problem of speech genres. Translated by V.W. McGee. In C. Emerson & M. Holquist (1986) (Eds.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (pp. 60–102). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M.M. (1984). Rabelais and His World. Translated by H. Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Braidotti, R. (2006). Posthuman, all too human: Towards a new process ontology. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(7–8), 197–208. Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (2nd ed.). New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2017). Posthuman critical theory. Journal of Posthuman Studies, 1(1), 9–25. Brandist, C. (2002). The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics. London: Pluto Press. Brennan, M. (2017). Struggles for teacher education in the age of the Anthropocene. Journal of Education, 69, 43–66. Cresswell, J., & Teucher, U. (2011). The body and language: M.M. Bakhtin on ontogenetic development. New Ideas in Psychology, 29, 106–118.

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Kim Davies and Peter Renshaw Cutter-Mackenzie, A., & Edwards, S. (2013).Toward a model for early childhood environmental education: Foregrounding, developing, and connecting knowledge through play-based learning. The Journal of Environmental Education, 44(3), 195–213. Davies, K. (2016). The Life and Times of ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’: A Bakhtinian Analysis of Discourses and Identities in Sociocultural Context. PhD Thesis, School of Education, The University of Queensland, https://doi. org/10.14264/uql.2016.162 Davies, K., & Renshaw, P. (2013). Being aspie or having Asperger Syndrome: Learning and the dialogical self at WrongPlanet.net. In M.B. Ligorio & M. Cesar (Eds.), Interplays Between Dialogical Learning and Dialogical Self (pp. 393–417). Charlotte, NC: IAP. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Emerson, C. (1997). The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Erdinast-Vulcan, D. (2013). Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Good, P. (2001). Language for Those Who Have Nothing: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Landscape of Psychiatry. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Goodley, D., Lawthom, R., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2014). Posthuman disability studies. Subjectivity, 7(4), 342–361. Goodley, D., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2013). The body as disability and possibility: Theorising the ‘leaking, lacking and excessive’ bodies of disabled children. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 15(1), 1–19. Goodley, D., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2016). Becoming dishuman: Thinking about the human through dis/ ability. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(1), 1–15. Graham, L., & Slee, R. (2008). An illusory interiority: Interrogating the discourse/s of inclusion. Educational Philosophy & Theory, 40(2), 277–293. Harraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women:The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. Harraway, D. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6, 159–165. www.environmentalhumanities.org Holquist, M. (2002). Dialogism (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking Language, Mind and World Dialogically: Interactional and Contextual Theories of Human Sense-Making. Charlotte, NC: IAP. Linell, P. (2010). With respect to Bakhtin: Some trends in contemporary dialogic theories. In K. Junefelt & P. Nordin (Eds.), Proceedings from the Second International Interdisciplinary Conference on Perspective and Limits of Dialogism in Mikhail Bakhtin, Stockholm University, June 3–5, 2009. Linell, P. (2017). Dialogue and the birth of the individual mind: With an example of communication with a congenitally Deafblind person. Journal of Deafblind Studies on Communication, 3, 59–79. Markova, I. (2003). Constitution of the self: Intersubjectivity and dialogicality. Culture and Psychology, 9, 249–259. Matusov, E. (2007). Applying Bakhtin scholarship on discourse in education: A critical review essay. Educational Theory, 57(2), 215–237. Moore, J. (2015). Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London and New York: Verso. Morrissey, P. (2015). Bill Neidjie’s story about feeling: Notes on its themes and philosophy. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 15(2), 1–10. Morson, G.S., & Emerson, C. (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Peeren, E. (2008). Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Renshaw, P., & Tooth, R. (2018). Diverse place-responsive pedagogies: Historical, professional and theoretical threads. In P. Renshaw & R.Tooth (Eds.), Diverse Pedagogies of Place: Educating Students in and for Local and Global Environments (pp. 1–21). London: Routledge. Renshaw, P.D. (2017). Positionality in researching the dialogic self: A commentary on the possibilities for dialogic theory and pedagogy. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction. doi:10.1016/j.lcsi.2017.10.008 Snaza, N., Appelbaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M., Rotas, N., Sandlin, J., Wallin, J., & Weaver, J. (2014). Toward a posthumanist education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 39–55. Somerville, M. (2010). A place pedagogy for “global contemporaneity”. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(3), 326–344.

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Who’s talking? Steinby, L., & Klapuri, T. (Eds.) (2013). Bakhtin and His Others: (Inter)subjectivity, Chronotope, Dialogism. London: Anthem Press. Stetsenko, A. (2007). Being-through-doing: Bakhtin and Vygotsky in dialogue. Cultural Studies in Science Education, 2, 746–783. Tarulli, D. (2001). Encounters with the other, toward a dialogical conception of the self. Doctoral Thesis, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstream/handle/10012/652/ NQ60571.pdf?sequence=1 Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2015). Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: Towards a common world pedagogy of multispecies vulnerability. Pedagogy, Culture & Society. doi:10.1 080/14681366.2015.1039050 Todorov, T. (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Translated by W. Godzich. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Tooth, R., & Renshaw, P. (2019). Children becoming emotionally attuned to “nature” through place responsive pedagogies. In A. Cutter-Mackenzie, K. Malone & E. Barratt Hacking (Eds.), Research Handbook on Childhoodnature: Assemblages of Childhood and Nature Research. Switzerland AG: Springer International Publishing, Springer Nature. Tuck, E., & McKenzie, M. (2014). Place in Research:Theory Methodology and Methods. New York: Routledge. White, E.J. (2013). Circles, borders and chronotope: Education at the boundary? Knowledge Cultures, 1(2), 145–169.

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4 EDUCATIONAL PROCESSES AND DIALOGICAL CONSTRUCTION OF SELF Giuseppina Marsico, Luca Tateo, Ramon Cerqueira Gomes and Virgínia Dazzani

Introduction: The importance of educational contexts in the dialogical development of the Self Human beings spend a large part of their life participating to activities named “educational”. Schools, religious institutions, sport activities, scout-groups, music bands or army are particular contexts which human collectives have built with educational purposes. They are characterized by a public evaluative dimension, an affective tonality and the evaluation of the performances that turns into an evaluation of the Self. It is trivial to say that the life experiences occurring in these contexts have a strong relevance in the development of the Self. The real question is “how” – during specific periods of developmental trajectory, as for instance the school age – the others (e.g. the adults) are dialoguing in specific ways with the Self of the children and how those dialogues become mediating tools for the regulation of both the Self and the other. This could be conceptualized in terms of “influence” of the educational context on the construction of the Self. Nevertheless, we think this is a quite poor way of understanding the question. A truly dialogical approach should look for the complex work of meaning-making and meaningnegotiation involved in the polyphonic process of Self becoming. Education is the arena for achieving a more sophisticated elaboration of the Self. In this chapter, we discuss the theoretical construct of Educational Self (Marsico & Tateo, 2018) to account for the process through which the person’s educational experiences are dialogically elaborated in the development of Self. First, we present the theoretical references and the history of the work that led to the formulation of the Educational Self construct. Then, we discuss the main aspects of the construct. Finally, we illuminate it with a case analysis, in order to make clear the complex interplay between educational processes and dialogical construction of Self.

What has been done, so far The construct of Educational Self is the core of this chapter and one of the new and fertile concepts in cultural psychology of education (Marsico, 2017; 2018). Its elaboration began almost a decade ago, during a research project focused on school–family relationships and academic assessment in the Italian school system (Marsico & Iannaccone, 2012; Marsico & Tateo, 2018). 50

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The research investigated the psychosocial and communicative dynamics in the school/family meetings and their effects on the construction of students’ identities, understood as the interface between the self and the hetero definition of the person as student, in middle school (age 11–14). We studied a specific “ritual”: the delivery of the students’ grade report by the school institution (represented by the teacher) to the family (represented by the parents). This ritual takes place on the school territory, with the young as the audience of the theatrical action between the teacher and the parents. The interactions during the meetings were analysed in order to observe some patterns between the parents’ and teachers’ management of the meeting, the family’s perceptions of the student’s academic outcome (success/failure) and the family’s socio-economic levels. The assessment represents the meeting/clashing ground between family and school. During the meetings, perceptions, meanings and personal evaluations are produced, affecting the construction of the young’s Self, understood as the unique synthesis that the student makes of the diversity of experiences as a person. Parents and teachers are ambivalent partners: they can be both allied and competitors in producing, making explicit and modulating representations of the student. Academic assessment is used not only to define the characteristics of  “good” and “poor” student but also to suggest a connotation of the person’s Self. These processes involve of course different power dynamics: teachers/students; teachers/parents; parents/students. Power relationships constitute at the same time the frame for the social interactions and a source of tension in such relationships, requiring a further negotiation that becomes part of the personal synthesis. Those initial observations led us to draw a new way to grasp the systemic, dynamic and dialogical processes of the Self development in the context of educational experiences in the life course. Initially, we developed the concept of Educational Self theoretically and complemented it with notions such as tensionality, dilemmatic field, borders, ambivalence (Marsico, 2015; 2018; Marsico & Tateo, 2017; Tateo, 2015). From there, the construct of Educational Self was elaborated, as a specific dimension of the Self, emerging from the individual’s experiences made in the educational context. If the Self is a unique synthesis, the educational experiences are at the same time an element of this whole and a source of tension, as they bring the hetero-definition into the picture. Since its first appearances in conferences, the construct raised a vivid debate that led to some international publications (Gomes, Dazzani, & Marsico, 2018; Marsico, Komatsu, & Iannaccone, 2013) and became the object of investigation for many researchers in different countries, who have tried to develop it empirically (for an overview, see Marsico & Tateo, 2018).

Theoretical foundations School has become a problematic institution in the countries providing compulsory education accessible to everybody (Marsico, 2018). According to Chaudhary: Outside of the family, it is the most significant experience of an institution that a child will have where there is a significant interface between the ‘I’ and the ‘other’. (2013, p. 308) School is the place where a child is confronted for the first time with systemic parameters that define what is acceptable and unacceptable in the Self development. Besides, school provides a constrained and socially regulated range of possibilities of such a Self development (Tateo, 2019). The idea of Educational Self is definitely not new: its foundations lay in the dialogical and cultural psychology of education and development, which understands this process in terms of dialogicality rather than social influence.The concept of dialogue implies that the interaction 51

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with the social other is appropriated by the Self and becomes a tool to create new meanings and to communicate them. The common metaphor is that of the internalized voices of the others into the Self, which thus becomes heterogeneous (Wertsch, 2009) and polyphonic (Hermans, 2001). The Self is a dialogue, in which the different social others are represented by the multivoicedness (Wertsch, 2009). The theoretical cornerstones of the Educational Self are: a) the Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics (Valsiner, 2014); b) the Dialogical Self Theory (Hermans, 2001); c) Bakhtin’s dialogicality (1990); d) the cultural-historical approach (Vygotsky, 1994); and, in general, the dialogical approaches to development and education (see Skidmore, Chapter 2 in this volume). Concerning Cultural Psychology, we assume the uniqueness and complexity of the Self development trajectory. In dialogical and cultural semiotic perspectives, the points – a), b) and d) – the Self is constructed starting from the child’s active internalization of the social interactions. The Self first appears at interpersonal level: others refer to the individual as a Self-entity, and in turn it responds to the others through signs-in-interaction (words, gestures, artifacts, etc.). The Dialogical Self Theory is based on a complementarity between autodialogue and heterodialogue (Ginev, 2017) and on their interchangeability under some conditions. The dialogue is made of hierarchically and temporally organized cycles of internalization and externalization: messages produced to the Self are elaborated by the Self in order to serve for the Self. Neither the avenues nor the outcomes of the dialogue are predictable, but certain orientations can be observed on the basis of the social suggestions available in the environment. Following the Bakhtinian perspective, the student – as any person – needs to “respond” dialogically to the social others, in her subjective task of constructing utterances/voices in the relation I–other in daily life responsivity is a concept developed by Bakhtin and his Circle (Bakhtin, 1990). It is a constitutive characteristic of culturally mediated communication processes. According to the Bakhtinian perspective about communication: any understanding of live speech […] is inherently responsive. Any understanding is imbued with a response and necessarily elicits it in one form or another: the listener becomes the speaker. (Bakhtin, 1979, p. 291) The students play an active role in their own education processes, according to the way they organize the dialogical dynamics in order to respond to the different voices in everyday interactions. The positions in relation to the different voices eventually sketch who the students are. It is assumed as a prerogative that the word is addressed to another, who is expected to respond (Menegassi, 2009). According to Bakhtin: from the very beginning, the speaker expects a response […] an active responsive understanding. The entire utterance is constructed, as it were, in anticipation of encountering this response. (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 94) The student responds and interacts with other people in educational contexts, through specific responsive dynamics in the I–other relationship. Thus, the concept of responsivity is directly related to the dialogical understanding of language. According to Menegassi (2009), meanings are produced through the constitutive presence of intersubjectivity – that is the interaction between subjectivities – during the verbal interaction. The idea of responsivity helps to account precisely for the inevitability of the responses/position constitution in everyday life, to the 52

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extent that this feature is embedded in the dialogical relation with the others. The response/ voice/position1 constitutes a configuration in the Self system that cannot exist without reference to the other. In the educational context, the constitution of an organized network of responses, related to the voices of others, can be considered a fundamental condition for the construction of the Educational Self (Gomes et al., 2018). This is why the dynamics of responsivity to others’ voices can tell a lot about the identity of the developing person in the process of schooling. According to the Dialogical Self ’s perspective (Hermans, 2003), the responses are expressed through the I-positions, which are both internal and external. From this standpoint, the traditional identity question of “who am I?”, should be rephrased as “who am I in relation to the other?” and “who is the other in relation to me?”. The relating of internal and external positions occurs by internalizing/externalizing cycles mediated by semiotic processes, as Vygotsky (2012) maintains. By internalizing, the child begins to use the signs, once received from others, in relation to herself. The Self, then, is as inherently polyphonic and dialogical as the variety of social interactions the child is taking part in. It also refers to the culturally defined set of meanings collectively shared in a specific social setting. Those internalized meanings become the tools that the child uses to operate on herself and on and with the others, by externalization of signs in coordinated activities. Internalization and semiotic mediation provide the person with the means to talk clearly about herself and to regulate her own psychic life and social conduct. So, the Self is culturally guided and personally enacted. Whereas culture provides the semiotic resources to model the experience and the expression of the “Self ”, that is the term commonly used to indicate the uniqueness of my psychological experience and my agentic role in the world. Going back to dialogicality, the internalized social voices of the adults are not “things” that can be “incepted” or “taken out” of the “box” of Self-system. Unfortunately, the current discourse about Dialogical Self in education tends to naturalize this metaphor and to forget that we are talking about processes and not entities. So, how can one account for the uniqueness and complexity of the Self-development individual trajectory in the complex situations named under the label “education”? From the perspective of the Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics (Valsiner, 2014), the Self is a semiotic process, so the principle of dialogicality is enriched by the analysis of the use of signs as generative and regulatory mechanism. During specific times of the developmental trajectory – as for instance the school age – the adult voices (signs) are actively internalized and negotiated (interpreted) to become later mediating tools (externalized) for the construction of the Self and of the I–other relationships (Simão, 2007). The process of negotiation can be as hard and painful, requiring time, as the process of education itself. The latter implies the deconstruction and reconstruction of previous systems of knowledge, values and affects. It requires a specific kind of dialogical interaction between people with different roles (e.g. teachers and students), under a specific set of conditions, within a particular system of rules and expectations. The set of cultural constraints, within which the educational dialogue unfolds, has transformative power. It supports the developmental changes in both the way in which we come to know the world around us and make sense of it and the definition of our Self (Marsico, 2015). At the same time, it generates a dynamic of tensions. After all, education can be both the way to free oneself – from the oppression of rigid forms of thinking and narrow-minded definitions of the Self and the other – and the imposition of such constraints on a free mind. The formal learning practices are usually aimed to develop the capability of abstract and general forms of knowledge, as well as a more integrated organization of the Self. However, tensions, oppositions and contradictions are the rule and not the exception in the Self dynamics, as well as in the educational practices. In other words, the process of education involves the 53

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tension between the person and the imagined-person, filled with the inherent ambivalence of educational ideology, where several kinds of tensions are at stake: the polyphony between the adults’ imagination (e.g. teacher, parents, etc.) and the child’s imagination (Tateo, 2015). Tension is a dialogical condition, or in other words, any dialogical condition is characterized by structural tension, which allows dynamic stability and development (Marsico & Tateo, 2017). In this perspective, tension is not a problematic state to overcome but a constitutive element of psychic life and the basis of educational process. The educational intervention is focused on an image of the child-to-be and is framed by a “window of possibilities” (Tateo, 2019), that are set up by the specific cultural configuration of values (see Figure 4.1). The child’s emotional experience (Vygotsky, 1994) at school is a complex negotiation between her own subjective world, the window of potential future selves provided by the school and the contextual conditions in which the experience takes place (Marsico & Tateo, 2018). The child can comply with the intervention or resist it (the backward dotted arrows in Figure 4.1), but she will have to negotiate between the potential different trajectories of the socially imagined-child-to-be and her own expectations, desires and needs. The vision of the partners in social interaction is in a certain sense always “exceeding”. It goes beyond the here-and-now, though departing from it. The exceeding comes from the imagined dimension of education as goal in the future and by an intrinsic characteristic of dialogical tension, that Bakhtin (1990) called exotopy. In the essay “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, Bakhtin (1990) specifically reflects about the process of artistic creation in which the author could see much more than the character could do by himself because of the exotopy (exteriority position). He analyses the relationship between the author and the character and discusses exotopy (exceeding of vision) as an intrinsic characteristic of the I–other relationship. Bakhtin focuses on the communicative processes both in life and in literary work. He maintains that the primary unit of any human experience is intrinsically relational. Therefore, it is crossed by the other: “the relationship of ‘I and the other’ is absolutely irreversible and given once and for all” (Bakhtin, 1990, p. 52). In this sense, we think that the notion of exotopy2 can lead to a richer understanding of the dynamics underneath the dialogical system of the Self (Gomes & Dazzani, 2018). Intervention occurs within the acceptable range of potential developmental trajectories established by the system of values and the contextual conditions in a specific community in function of

The teacher initiates an educational intervention

on the

with a potential resistance to

Actual child with her own subjectivity

Imagined definition of the child to-be

requiring a negotiation with

Figure 4.1 Educational intervention in function of a value-laden imagined child.

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In the Dialogical Self approach, the Self is defined by its intersubjective exchange and the social predominance in its processes (Hermans, 2002) and by being understood in its systemic nature.The Dialogical Self is “social”, not in the sense that a self-contained individual enters into social interactions with other people “outside” but in the sense that other people occupy inner positions in a multi-voiced Self. Furthermore, the Self is not an entity that can be described merely in terms of internal positions, as if they were monologic traits, but should be described in the context of other positions and coalitions of positions (Hermans, 2001). Another very helpful element of Bakhtinian philosophy is the idea that time and space are essential conditions for the analysis of the discourses of the literary characters, as well as the metaphor of the polyphonic novel, developed in “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics” (1929/1973). The author–hero relationship is just one of the forms taken by human interactions, that are strongly characterized by exotopy. In Bakhtin’s own words: The excess of my seeing in relation to another human being provides the foundation for a certain sphere of my own exclusive self-activity, i.e., all those inner and outer actions which only I can perform in relation to the other, and which are completely inaccessible to the other himself from his own place outside of me; all those actions, that is, which render the other complete precisely in those respects in which he cannot complete himself by himself. (Bakhtin, 1990, p. 24) Every discourse is possible only by starting from a chronotope, that is a specific position in the time–space. When a voice is in exotopic position with respect to another, it has the “advantage” to produce and exert an exceeding vision over the latter. The chronotope’s localization also implies extra-localization. If a voice must be uttered from a given position, it will be in exotopic position with respect to all the others (i.e. Position A sees beyond and listens to Positions B, C, D and E). However, if another Position B has the opportunity to dialogue, its discourse will assume the exotopic property over Position A and over all the others. The Position B sees beyond and listens to A, C, D and E from a position of exceeding vision. Each position can be a voice of the Self as much as a social other. According to Gomes (2018), exotopy is an inherent feature of the dynamics of Self positions and works as regulatory mechanism, in which every person/Position A sees the other B from its position of exteriority. So, Position A can see many more things than Position B can by itself alone. This activates the meaning-making process. We can imagine a common example of everyday school life to illustrate the idea. There is a student who shows some disengagement with school and decides to give up despite her dream of becoming an engineer. A professor invites the student for a talk about the issue together with the principal. Both adults produce messages about the risk of jeopardizing the student’s life projects and about how much they care about her future. They claim that she can still develop a lot and support her in achieving her goals. The parents of the students are invited, too, and they confirm the messages in coalition with the professor and the principal. In this hypothetic situation, there is the student producing an I-position “I-as-demotivated-student”, who listens to other voices that promote positions like “You-as-person-with-potential”, “We-support-you”, etc.The different voices also imply power relationships, that frame the meaning-making process. This condition has the potential to generate new meanings to be negotiated through the student’s Educational Self. In the dialogic interaction with significant others in exotopic positions, the coalition of voices constituting the Educational Self can agree, reject or partially modify the new proposed meanings. The same process would describe an opposite situation, in which the adults’ voices promote for instance negative positions: “You-as-lazy-student” or “We-do-not-care”. Here again, the Educational Self 55

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acts as mediator in accepting, rejecting or partially modifying the meanings. In all these cases, the exchange of semiotic resources between I-positions is a function of the Educational Self capability to respond to both auto- and hetero-messages. In some situations that can trigger new demands in the academic life, as for instance school transitions, the students are often invited to respond to the voices of significant social others, that express different expectations: peers, parents, professors, etc. In this interim, students need to negotiate the degree of acceptance or rejection of hetero-messages, from the perspective of the I-positions already established in the Educational Self system. The dialogical negotiation of new meanings is enabled by the system of exotopic relationships between I-positions, that continuously expands and shrinks the horizon of each I-position in relation to the configuration of the whole Self system. Moreover, in the next section we will try to articulate the exotopic feature, with the future-goal-oriented characteristics of the educational intervention, observing its implications. In summary, the theoretical foundations of our construct include the idea of the Self as a dialogical semiotic process. Through cycles of internalization and externalization, mediated by signs, the Self develops negotiating future-oriented meanings. These meanings exceed the single perspective, both in the sense of the imagined future goals and the exotopic dimension of dialogism.The polyphony of voices, which dialogues with the social cultural frame of reference, implies tensional stability, that is a condition in which tension is a constitutive part of the conservation/change dynamics (Davies & Renshaw, Chapter 3 in this volume). Given the theoretical background, we will now proceed to define the main characteristics of our construct.

Defining the Educational Self The Educational Self is a specific dimension of the Self, a semiotic regulatory process emerging from the experiencing of the I–other relationships (Bakhtin, 1986) in the educational context (Marsico & Tateo, 2018). These experiences specifically contribute to the lifespan identity’s definition. The peer relationships, the interactions with significant adults and the academic assessments affect almost every aspect of personal development. They provide values, models of behaviour, norms, semiotic repertoires, emotional experiences, knowledge and practices that are internalized in the form of “voices”, constituting a capital of semiotic resources on which the person will draw during all her life. The Educational Self is not a topological concept. It is not a part or a place in the Self, where educational experiences are somehow “stored”. Its emergence, elaboration and change are basically dialogical processes, during the social interactions taking place in the educational contexts and involving cognitive, affective, representational and practical dimensions. The school context is like a theatrical stage, on which the voices assume special qualities, resonances, echoes and ways of diffusion.The Educational Self is based on the idea that the set of adults’ discourses about the student provide a wide repertoire of Self definitions, that the student internalizes from the very early age elaborating her own meaning. Utterances like “You are a good boy”, “You are a sociable girl” or “You are intelligent but lazy” – so common in everyday school discourses – are but suggestions for the definition of the Self, that the student has to negotiate and make sense of (see Figure 4.2). The child uses these internalized semiotic resources, producing a complex negotiation in which some of them will be later used by the child to talk about herself. Other definitions will be ignored, rejected or partially modified. The definitions are not only about the Self at present time, but they provide directions for the developmental trajectory (Tateo, 2019). The school context is full of contradictory and ambivalent suggestions about what the child is, what she 56

Dialogical construction of Self Polyphony of adults' discourse From the evaluation of the school performance to the child personality The child active internalisation of the adult’s feedback Construction of the self during the school age through adult’s discourse and appropriation of symbolic resources

Tools/signs Goals

Childhood and adolescence

Emergence and re-elaboration of the Self when experiencing the participation to activities in educational contexts Adulthood

Human development

Figure 4.2 The construction and elaboration of Educational Self.

is not, what she should become or not become. The Educational Self construct allows us to grasp such a complexity in a way that both environmental suggestions and personal characteristics can be taken into account to understand how the educational experience is contributing to the elaboration of the child’s Self throughout development. Moreover, the Educational Self will be reactivated anytime the person is engaged in educational activities (e.g. as teacher, as parent, as trainee, etc.) in the life course. Education is an eminently dialogic process that contributes to the polyphonic elaboration of the Self during school age, but whose outcomes continue to be relevant throughout people’s lives. It also follows that despite academic achievements being recognized as one of the crucial factors in the schooling experience, internalized and externalized social relations promoted by the school precede and mediate the whole process of education. To illuminate the heuristic value of Educational Self construct, we will now discuss a concrete example of school life, from one of the first empirical studies developed in recent years: a study by Gomes (2018) about the transition to vocational high school.

The case of Alice The case we selected is an example of a quite ordinary transition in a young girl’s school trajectory, in order to show the prosaicness of Educational Self. Alice is 15. She is Catholic, from a rural community in the region of Bahia, Brazil. She lives far from her school, which is located in a small town. For this reason, she is currently living in the school dorm. She is studying a vocational program in agriculture integrated in the high school curriculum. Her father is a health worker and her mother is a housewife, who used to be a teacher. She has also a younger sister. Alice’s goal is to access a good education, that allows her to get a high score in the university entry test. She says: “My mother and my father supported me a lot, because they already knew [about the school] and we have a relative who studied there, and is now at the university, he is finishing the university this year”. Alice is in dialogue with these voices in establishing an active responsive relation that emphasizes her choice. In her words: “I really wanted to be here (vocational school), that’s why I took the entry test twice”. Entering the school is a valuable event for her family and the whole community, though she failed the first try. So, these voices provide Alice with a semiotic orientation in her future self-projection: a better education means accessing better universities and meeting the expectations of significant others, to whom her Educational Self is responding. Family and neighbors’ voices present her with a positive perspective, which encourages her to retake the 57

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school entry test. The alignment of the voices, reinforcing the idea that Alice is eventually able to pass the entry test, supports the configuration of a dialogic dynamic that minimizes the tension of the Self system. The exotopic feature in this case offers new perspectives of success in the selection process. Indeed, despite the first failure in the entry test, Alice is not expressing a strong tension in the Educational Self system. She reports that when she saw the test results, she had already taken into consideration the possibility of failing. She says: “I did not care very much about it, I went along, when I entered this year I understood that I was not yet ready, that it was better [to enter] this year”. As she reports, the sentence is actually a re-elaboration of the meaning of the past experience after entering the institution, when she happened to live far from her family. It is worth noting the dynamic of meaning-making in coalition with the significant others in Alice’s school trajectory. The very same voices that supported her in achieving the entry selection are minimizing the tension produced by the first fail. Alice notes: [Parents and neighbors] encouraged me a lot, [they said] that [the first fail] was the first obstacle, that I didn’t pass, but I had more shots, and I would succeed later [entering the school], encouraged me a lot. […] Considering the score of the first [entry test], I understood that if I had studied a lot and got a better score, I would get it the second time and, as I was young, and that I had the chance to pass. Considering the score of the first entry test, Alice projects herself in the future and – by activating her Main I-positions (I-as-committed-student, I-as-supported-student and I-as-professor’sfriend) – she finds semiotic resources that contribute to build a future perspective. Conceiving the possibility to write more and get better scores, she safeguards the core of her Main I-position, pointing at her academic commitment. This perspective is validated by significant others, who voice the messages that help to buffer the tension and resonate with her Main I-position: the evaluation of her school failure, performance and her potentialities become an internalized evaluation of the person. It can also be said that the different voices must imply asymmetric power relationships in order to become meaningful. In Alice’s cultural context, adults’ voices are valued as “wisdom”, framing in this way the personal elaboration of meaning. Alice seems to have developed a quite stable configuration of the Self-system, with the presence of a prevalent meaning expressed through a position of I-as-committed-student, that emerged in the course of the previous educational experiences.The idea of academic excellence is not part of the Main I-position. This contributes to cope more effectively with the tensions produced by the first failure. She does not need to become better to achieve her goals: the perspective of the I-position is based on the meaning that she just needs further effort (see Figure 4.3). The meaning-making is enhanced by the significant others, who treat her failure as a minor occasional event that can be solved at the second attempt. This message commits Alice to respond to their expectations about her person and what can be understood as her sense of “self-efficacy”.3 She responds with the meaning that she can fail but that she can try again, and success is definitely possible, because she is a committed student. As Marsico and Iannaccone (2012) stress, the academic self-evaluation, permeated by the voices of significant others, resonates with the self-evaluation in the other life contexts. The relevance of school failure/success in the life trajectory of the student can be clearly recognized in the dialogues taking place on the family–school border as a central question affecting the Self. Alice elaborates her Main I-positions according to the necessity of responding to the other voices both in the school and 58

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Figure 4.3 The configuration of I-positions activated and the enhanced exotopy in the inverted flux (from periphery to center) of semiotic movement: Main I-position in tension (Gomes, 2018, p. 185).

in the community. She thus produces meanings about I-as-committed-student, supported by the voices of significant others internalized in exotopic positions (parents, professors, friends, neighbors). This allows her to semiotically cultivate her Main I-position in the Self system. The voices of the others provide the semiotic resources she can use to protect the exotopic development of I-as-committed-student. As she puts it: “you just have to commit and strive for because here works like this, is there for you to learn, but you must run after it”. One can notice how she stresses the role of commitment and effort in pursuing academic success when she reports her first months in the new school. The idea of achieving a given educational goal by persever59

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ance – in accordance with both auto- and hetero-messages in a coalition of voices – leads Alice to produce a new narrative, based on the assumption that reaching a goal is consistently associated with the perspective of the I-as-committed-student. So, this I-position is empowered in the dialogical hierarchy of the Educational Self system. In the case of Alice, the Educational Self worked as a mediator between the imagined and the exotopic suggestions. However, in her case, this was not particularly ambivalent or problematic, to the extent that the polyphony of internalized voices was consonant. So, the imagined child and the expected direction of development were somehow easier to negotiate. Her consonance has held on, despite the problematic event of the first rejection. Complementarily, the preexisting consonance of social voices has exactly allowed Alice to overcome the obstacle, finding a personal synthesis without particularly dramatic ruptures.

Concluding remarks In this chapter, we have presented a new construct: the Educational Self. We have criticized a naturalized use of dialogical theories in education, when they consider “voices” as something put “into” people’s head that can be incepted or taken off. We have proposed a theoretical foundation, in which different traditions converge in the idea of the Self as a process. From this, we have defined the Educational Self as a specific dimension of the Self, a semiotic regulatory process, emerging from the experience of the I–other relationship in the educational contexts, that specifically contributes to the lifespan identity’s definition. Finally, we have discussed a real case study, presenting the transition of a young girl between two school contexts. The story of Alice, which is a quite ordinary and non-dramatic example of dealing with academic obstacles, shows how a certain degree of tension is always present in the Educational Self system. Tension is not a pathology, rather a characteristic of any dialogical process: education is indeed a dialogical tensionality. The dialogical construction of Educational Self aims at making sense of how the educational experiences contribute to the development of Self. It operates at different scales. It accounts for ontogenetic processes, that is the relevance of educational settings both as a childhood and as an adult. It also operates at a microgenetic level, concretely showing how the student creates a personal synthesis, through cycles of internalization/externalization of semiotic resources. These resources are characterized by ambivalence, constraints and suggestions about what the person can, should, should not or must become. The imagined and the exotopic continuously provide terms of comparison for the Self. Alice was a fortunate example of harmony between semiotic resources. It is worth thinking, instead, of all the cases in which the polyphony is not harmonic, rather a cacophony.To what extent would moments of transitions be negotiated by an Educational Self system in which tensional dynamics can lead to disruptive outcomes? What if adult voices are telling you something very different from what you think about yourself? These and many other questions arise from our reflection. We claim that the construct of Educational Self can be useful to understand the dialogical process of self-development in relation to education, accounting for both the positive and negative outcomes.

Notes 1 According to our understanding of Hermans’ theory (2001; 2003), responsivity, voice and I-position constitute a triplet. Indeed, the inevitability of the dialogical response to the other in a specific chronotope occurs by the mean of a voice which is always expressed by an I-position. Sometimes, we observe that for instance “voice” and “position” are used interchangeably, which can generate some confusion.

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Dialogical construction of Self 2 The notion of exotopy was elaborated in Gomes’ doctoral thesis (2018) as an intrinsic characteristic (exteriority position) of the dialogic dynamic among I-positions related to surplus of seeing of anyone. 3 Perceived self-efficacy: people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce effects (Bandura, 1994)

References Bakhtin, M. (1990). Author and hero in aesthetic activity. In M. Holquist & V. Liapunov (Eds.), Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays (pp. 4–256). Austin, TX: University of Texas. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (V. McGee,Trans.; C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1979). The Aesthetics of Verbal Creativity. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Bandura, A. (1994). Self-efficacy. In V. S. Ramachaudran (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (Vol. 4, pp. 71–81). New York: Academic Press. (Reprinted in H. Friedman [Ed.], Encyclopedia of mental health. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1998). Chaudhary, N. (2013). Collision, confrontation, and collaborations of the self in culture. In M. Beatrice Ligorio & M. César (Eds.), Interplays Between Dialogical Learning And Dialogical Self (pp. 291–316). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Ginev, D. (2017). The dialogical self from the viewpoint of hermeneutic phenomenology. Culture & Psychology, 1–27. Gomes, R., & Dazzani,V. (2018). Exotopic processes in emergency of new positions in self. Human Arenas, 1(3), 191–197. Gomes, R., Dazzani, V., & Marsico, G. (2018). The role of responsiveness within the self in transitions to university. Culture & Psychology, 24(1), 49–59. Gomes, R. C. (2018). Regulação semiótica no self educacional de adolescentes na transição para o ensino médio profissionalizante: A atuação da exotopia dentre as posições do eu. Doctoral thesis, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Psicologia, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, BA, Brazil. Retrieved 1 september 2018 at https://pospsi.ufba.br/sites/pospsi.ufba.br/files/ramon_gomes_tese.pdf Hermans, H. J. M. (2002). The dialogical self as a society of mind: An introduction. Theory and Psychology, 12(2), 147–160. Hermans, H. J. M. (2003). The construction and reconstruction of a dialogical self. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 16, 89–130. Hermans, J. M. (2001). The dialogical self: Toward a theory of personal and cultural positioning. Culture & Psychology, 7(3), 243–282. Marsico, G. (Ed). (2015). Jerome S. Bruner beyond 100. Cultivating possibilities. In Cultural Psychology of Education (Vol. 2). Cham: Springer. Marsico, G. (2017). Jerome S. Bruner: Manifesto for the future of education. Infancia y Aprendizaje, Journal for the Study of Education and Development, 40(4), 754–781. Marsico, G. (2018). The challenges of the schooling from cultural psychology of education. Integrative Psychological and Behavioural Sciences, 52(3), 474–489. Marsico, G., & Iannaccone, A. (2012). The Work of Schooling. In J.Valsiner (Ed), Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology (pp. 830–868). New York: Oxford University Press. Marsico, G.,Tateo, L. (2018). Introduction:The construct of educational self. G. Marsico and L.Tateo, (Eds.). The Emergence of Self in Educational Contexts. Theoretical and Empirical Cxplorations, Cultural Psychology of Education, (pp. 1–14) Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Marsico, G., Komatsu, K., & Iannaccone, A. (Eds.). (2013). Crossing Boundaries. Intercontextual Dynamics Between Family and School. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Marsico, G., & Tateo, L. (2017). Borders, tensegrity and development in dialogue. Integrative Psychological and Behavioural Sciences, 51(4), 536–556. Marsico, G., & Tateo, L. (2018). Introduction: The construct of educational self. In G. Marsico & L. Tateo (Eds.), The Emergence of Self in Educational Contexts. Theoretical and Empirical Explorations, Cultural Psychology of Education (Vol. 8). Cham: Springer. Menegassi, R. J. (2009). Aspectos da responsividade na interação verbal. Revista Línguas e Letras, 10(18), 147–170. Simão, L. M. (2007). Why “Otherness” in the research domain of semiotic-cultural constructivism? In L. M. Simão & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Otherness in Question – Labyrinths of the Self (pp. 11–35). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

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Marsico, Tateo, Cerqueira Gomes and Dazzani Tateo, L. (2015). Let’s frankly play: Ambivalence, dilemmas and imagination. In G. Marsico (Ed.), Jerome S. Bruner Beyond 100: Cultivating Possibilities (pp. 55–64). New York: Springer. Tateo, L. (2019). Introduction: The inherent ambivalence of educational trajectories and the zone of proximal development with reduced potential. In L.Tateo (Ed.), Educational Dilemmas. A Cultural Psychological Perspective. London: Routledge. Valsiner, J. (2014). An Invitation to Cultural Psychology. London: Sage. Vygotsky, L. S. (1994).The problem of the environment. In R. van der Veer, & J.Valsiner (Eds.), The Vygotsky Reader (pp. 338–354). Oxford: Blackwell. Vygotsky, L. S. (2012). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wertsch, J. V. (2009). Voices of the Mind: Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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5 LINGUISTIC ETHNOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF CLASSROOM DIALOGUE Adam Lefstein and Julia Snell

According to the current conventional wisdom, classroom dialogue that involves students jointly constructing knowledge, exchanging ideas, advancing arguments and critiquing one another’s thinking is good for their learning and cognitive development. This conventional wisdom is reflected in practical teaching strategies that form an “emerging pedagogy of the spoken word … that exploits the power of talk to engage and shape children’s thinking and learning, and to secure and enhance their understanding” (Alexander, 2008, p. 92). Resnick, Asterhan and Clarke (2015) describe the features of such academically productive classroom talk as follows: This kind of talk begins with students thinking out loud about a domain concept: noticing something about a problem, puzzling through a surprising finding, or articulating, explaining, and reflecting upon their own reasoning. Students do not simply report facts they already know for the teacher to evaluate. Instead, with teacher guidance, they make public their half-formed ideas, questions, and nascent explanations. Other students take up their classmates’ statements: challenging or clarifying a claim, adding their own questions, reasoning about a proposed solution, or offering a counter claim or an alternate explanation … The key component is the learning power generated by two or more minds working on the same problem together. (pp. 3–4) Research designed to explore this and similar forms of classroom dialogue has focused primarily on structural and cognitive dimensions of discourse and interaction, including, for example, teacher questions, student reasoning, teacher feedback and the distribution of participation. Such a focus makes good sense – not only are these issues central to most characterizations of dialogic pedagogy, they also readily lend themselves to systematic observation and quantitative measurement. Nevertheless, more happens in dialogic teaching and learning than is captured in these and related measures. Students negotiate their own and one another’s identities, make sense of lesson content and expectations, manage relationships with peers and teacher, struggle to assert their voices and find creative ways of passing the time while also staying out of trouble. Likewise, teachers are occupied with managing these student concerns, classroom power relations and 63

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institutional pressures, while also living up to dialogic ideals. While such issues are not often the focus of research on dialogic pedagogy, they critically shape dialogic processes and outcomes. In this chapter we introduce linguistic ethnography as a useful set of tools for making sense of these and related issues. First, we briefly explain this methodological approach, its assumptions, concepts and methods. Next, we illustrate the application of this approach to the analysis of an episode from a primary literacy lesson, focusing in particular on pupil identity work – that is, the processes through which pupils and teacher attribute identity categories to themselves and each other (we elaborate this sociocultural linguistic approach next). We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of linguistic ethnographic analyses for understanding and advancing dialogic pedagogy.

Linguistic ethnography Linguistic ethnography is an umbrella term used to describe a growing body of research, primarily in Europe, which brings together linguistic methods for studying language and discourse data with ethnographic interpretation of cultural practices. The approach is employed to study a range of disciplinary fields and professional contexts, including education, psychology, health, communication and management (see e.g. Snell, Copland, & Shaw, 2015; Tusting, fc). Linguistic ethnography draws upon concepts and methods from multiple traditions in the study of discourse and interaction, including the ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, micro-ethnography, social semiotics and new literacy studies. It has been significantly influenced by linguistic anthropology and shares many of the same theoretical underpinnings (for a discussion, see Rampton, Maybin, & Roberts, 2015). However, whilst linguistic anthropology has prospered in North America, in Europe an “institutionalized linguistic anthropology” (Rampton, 2007, p. 594) did not develop. Linguistic ethnography integrates ethnography’s openness and holism (among other advantages) with the insights and rigor of linguistics (Rampton, 2007; Rampton et al., 2015). In practice, this means adopting an ethnographic perspective and using ethnographic tools to study everyday practices and social structures, drawing upon anthropological and sociological theories and research practices (Green & Bloome, 1997, p. 183), while also using systematic linguistic analysis to extend ethnographic observation into smaller and more focused spaces and to examine closely small (but consequential) aspects of social life. In relation to classroom data, linguistic analysis typically involves long, slow immersion in audio- and/or video-recorded data, analysing interaction turn-by-turn, asking at each moment, e.g. “What is the speaker doing?” “Why that, now?” “What else might have been done here but wasn’t?” “What next?” (see Rampton, 2006, pp. 395–398 for a description of this “micro-analytic” approach). By replaying and reanalysing video data, often muted, linguistic ethnographers also focus on nonverbal communicative resources such as spatial configuration, body postures, gesture and gaze.This multi-modal analysis enriches the analysis of spoken discourse and also brings into view those pupils whose participation in the lesson is less vocal (and who are thus largely absent from the transcript) (Bezemer & Jewitt, 2010). These micro- and multimodal analyses reveal the moment-to-moment unfolding in interaction of social stances, roles and relationships and the creation and recreation of local knowledge, power and identities. At the same time, by drawing upon ethnographic knowledge of events outside of the immediate interactional here-and-now, linguistic ethnographers contextualize their micro-interactional investigations within the wider practices of the classroom, school and culture, examining the circulation of voices, ideas and discourses between the classroom and other contexts (e.g. the curriculum, policy documents, popular culture, other lessons and wider discourses about 64

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language, education and the social order). As Copland and Creese point out, it is the combination of linguistics and ethnography that “links the micro to the macro, the small to the large, the varied to the routine, the individual to the social, the creative to the constraining, and the historical to the present and to the future” (2015, p. 26). Linguistic ethnography has been applied to numerous issues around classroom discourse and dialogue, including the implications of social processes and relationships for joint knowledge construction (e.g. O’Connor, 1996; Swann, 2007); the construction of teacher and pupil identities (e.g. Bloome, Carter, Christian, & Shuart-Faris, 2005; Castanheira, Green, Dixon, & Yeager, 2007; Snell & Lefstein, 2018; Wortham, 2006); teacher stance and its implications for pupil authority (e.g. Boyd & Markarian, 2011; O’Connor & Michaels, 1993); teacher and pupil processes of making sense (e.g. Godfrey & O’Connor, 1995; Kelly, Crawford, & Green, 2001; McDermott & Gospodinoff, 1979); the interaction of pupil and teacher cultural resources and the official curriculum (e.g. Duff, 2004; Gutierrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995; Lefstein & Snell, 2011); pupil voice and its realization in classroom discourse (e.g. Maybin, 2006; Park et al., 2017; Segal & Lefstein, 2016); how educational policy and school contexts shape classroom dialogue (e.g. Aukerman, 2013; Segal, Snell, & Lefstein, 2017) and how changes in the broader communicative ecology shape the classroom interactional regime (e.g. Rampton & Harris, 2010).1 Linguistic ethnographic analyses of discourse and interaction are grounded in a number of fundamental insights about social interaction, meaning-making and the communicative order. Here we highlight three principles that we find particularly important for the study of classroom dialogue, and their methodological implications: (1) Meaning is co-constructed in interaction. Rather than viewing meaning as residing within individuals’ minds, linguistic ethnographers trace the ways in which meaning emerges in the interactional give-and-take, as interlocutors display to one another (and to the analyst) how they are making sense of each other’s turns at talk and then ratify or repair their conversational partners’ interpretations (Heritage, 1984). In such a way, meaning is jointly achieved over a series of turns at talk and therefore can and should be analysed sequentially, by tracing the process of its turn-by-turn co-construction. (2) Meaning and interaction are shaped by historical and cultural contexts. Discourse carries meanings and values associated with the many “contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293). Hence, for example, legal discourse brings to mind lawyers, judges and courts and the ways of being and believing relevant to them. Therefore, making sense of discourse involves attending to its history, both in general and specifically with regard to the particular social group and situation of its use (Silverstein & Urban, 1996). But which contexts are most salient? Addressing this question requires that we pay close attention to how interlocuters contextualize their interaction (Duranti & Goodwin, 1992). Such contextualization is jointly accomplished by conversational partners through implicitly evoking or explicitly indicating relevant contexts through, for example, their use of language, enactment of identities and roles, knowledge references or engagement in activities. (3) We do multiple things when we talk (beyond the exchange of ideas). We not only use language to convey ideas, we also, while using language for this referential function, perform a range of social functions. We open lines of communication, negotiate roles and relationships, assert identities, make or extricate ourselves from commitments, take stances, persuade, entertain, pass the time and more.Typically, though not always consciously, we perform many of these and other tasks at once. Hence, analyses of discourse that exclusively focus on its ideational content offer rather narrow views of what participants are doing and what concerns occupy and motivate them. 65

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The complexity and ambiguity of discourse and social interaction captured by these three principles – i.e. the instability and emergence of meaning, its historical and cultural situatedness and the multiple purposes and dimensions of communication – lead to a general methodological principle to let our data drive our analysis.We cannot approach our data without theory: the very act of transforming social life into social science data necessarily involves choices, which are motivated by prior understandings and concepts (i.e. theory). However, our analysis will benefit from treating our discourse data as situated interaction prior to investigating it as an instance of a theoretical construct. In such a way, we put our own theoretical interests into broader perspective – including the perspectives of the participants in the event analysed – and thereby enrich our understandings of both the event and the theory. Ultimately, we return to and apply our theories to the data, but in this application we strive to use our theories as sensitizing rather than definitive concepts, which “suggest directions along which to look” rather than “prescriptions of what to see” (Blumer, 1954, p. 7). In this way, our encounter with our data can help us to extend or problematize our theory (Burawoy, 1998). In the spirit of foregrounding data analysis, in what follows we demonstrate linguistic ethnographic analysis and its contribution to understanding classroom discourse, interaction and dialogic pedagogy through exploration of an exchange in a Year 5 literacy lesson.

“I don’t really like that, Miss” – An illustration Ms Leigh is teaching the second of two consecutive lessons on story openers. She has just demonstrated to the class the lesson’s key idea and objective – to open their stories by dropping the reader right into the action – and begins to set them the task of working in pairs to act out the opening to their own story in order to think about how to improve it. Before she finishes her instructions, however, she is interrupted by an interjection from William: “Miss, I don’t really like that. I – I sort of like a bit of talk before it”. William’s challenge leads to a relatively dialogic, sixminute discussion of the merits of various ways of opening stories. In what follows we explore this six-minute segment, first as an instance of dialogic teaching and pupil reasoning, and then as an opportunity to illustrate the sort of issues that can emerge in a linguistic ethnographic analysis. First, a bit of background about how we happened to be video-recording the lesson. Ms Leigh and her colleagues at Abbeyford Primary School (all names are pseudonyms) collaborated with us in Towards Dialogue, a research project that investigated processes of continuity and change in classroom discourse. In this study, a group of teachers experimented with dialogic pedagogy and reflected with us on video-recorded episodes from their lessons. The project, and indeed this particular episode, are described in detail in Lefstein and Snell (2014); here we briefly touch on some key points to illustrate linguistic ethnographic analyses. We highly recommend watching the video and reading the transcript alongside our analysis.2 This episode stood out to us for a number of reasons. First, William’s challenge was a rather exceptional event – English pupils rarely challenge their teachers so explicitly – which produced the sort of cognitive tension necessary for productive dialogue. Second, in the wake of William’s challenge the class critically consider a number of texts and literary ideas in a “dialogic spell” (Nystrand, Gamoran, Kachur, & Prendergast, 1997) rich with further challenges, clarifications, elaborations and joint knowledge construction; we sensed this intuitively at the time and were able to confirm it months later after we coded this and other lessons for key indicators of dialogic discourse (types of questions and feedback, the extent of pupil participation, etc.). Third, the sequence also poses numerous dilemmas for the teacher, making it an ideal episode for exploring the complexities of dialogic teaching.

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We briefly describe the episode before proceeding to its analysis. The event can be roughly broken up into six stages:

An effective story opener? (lines 1–64) Ms Leigh directs two pupils, Rachel and Terry, to model the drama activity she intends to assign to the class. At Ms Leigh’s direction, Rachel acts out while Terry narrates two ways of opening a story. The first sentence is unexciting (“I was walking down the road one day”) and thus elicits lacklustre actions from Rachel. Rachel enacts the second sentence, “‘Oh no it’s a tornado’ she shouted and ran”, more dynamically. Ms Leigh explains to the pupils that this opening is more effective because “we drop ourselves right in the action to start off with and we have some speech there as well”. One pupil, William, challenges this method of opening a story:

33 34 35 36 37

William:

38 39 40 41 42

William: Ms Leigh:

Ms Leigh:

William:

miss I don’t really like (.) that I- I sort of like a bit of talk before it well it depends on how you want to start your story doesn’t it ((nodding)) (yeah) so you could haveyou mean talk as the narrator or talk as the actors no the narrator

An alternative story opener (lines 65–122) Ms Leigh asks William what he would do instead to start his story. She says that she’s heard Ms Forester (the class Learning Support Assistant) and Terry talking about how they’re not going to start their story and raises the challenge of whether William will begin his story in this way. William says that he “wouldn’t start it like, drop it straight in the action with the first line”, rather he would “have a bit of narrator talk to tell you what’s going on, and the characters and where you are and that, and then get into the action”. Ms Leigh summarizes William’s approach as “start[ing] off at the bottom of the story mountain with the narrator directing the action”, and asks him for an example. William reads aloud the beginning of his story: “loads of people think nothing’s going to happen as they go into a tunnel”. To provide a contrast to William’s story opener, Ms Leigh reaches behind her and picks up a novel, The Fall (Nix, 2000), which happens to be on her desk. She reads out the dramatic beginning to this story, which indeed drops the reader directly into the action: “Tal stretched out his hand and pulled himself up onto the next outthrust spike of tower”. By using this book, Ms Leigh demonstrates how much more exciting it is to begin a story right in the middle of the action (compare William’s “loads of people thing nothing’s going to happen as they go into a tunnel”). William sticks to his original position, however, by suggesting that sometimes books begin with “a little paragraph before” the main opening (lines 108–109). Another pupil, Harry, calls this “a prologue” (line 116). Ms Leigh elaborates, “so that [a prologue] would help you to have your narrator voice”.

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“I really want to know what happens next” (lines 123–161) Ms Leigh then encourages Ms Forester, the Learning Support Assistant, to contribute to the discussion: “I just want to go back to what your conversation- because you’re getting a bit twitchy here Ms Forester. Why are you twitching?”. Ms Forester is “twitching” because her interest has been piqued in the novel after hearing the first sentence that Ms Leigh read aloud. She tells Ms Leigh and the class, “I really want to know what happens next”. Ms Leigh wonders about her response to William’s story opener, but Ms Forester cannot “even remember” it: 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161

Ms Leigh:

Ms Forester:

William:

Flynn: Ms Forester: Harry: William: Ms Forester: William: Ms Forester:

[what did you want to know from William’s story [((William signals towards Harry? Harry takes his hand down)) (2) I can’t even remember what hiswhat was the beginning William tell me [again [erm many people go to a tunnel thinking nothing’s going to happen ((Harry raises his hand)) [well yeah because you want to know what’s (xxxxx) [well that happens every day [I go into a tunnel thinking nothing’s going to happen [((Raises hand)) but then that’s quite normal but then (.) and then Hmmm

Dramatic narration (lines 162–185) Building upon Ms Forester’s response, Ms Leigh demonstrates how William could develop his idea to open his story with narration by adding some foreshadowing: 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178

Ms Leigh: so what we need to do is see if we can develop that [a little bit more Flynn: [or xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) Ms Leigh: well we could maybe have a hint from the narrator earlier that there might have been something that had goyou know ((dramatically)) the tunnel had recently been repaired from the tragic accident that had killed a bus load full of school children (1) as usual William and his father went through thinking nothing was going to go wrong ((normal voice)) and then you’ve got a hint that oh there’s already an accident

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Introduction of another text (lines 186–307) After her dramatic reformulation of William’s opening, Ms Leigh invites Harry, who has raised his hand persistently throughout the episode, to contribute. Harry introduces another text, Necropolis (Horowitz, 2008), into the discussion. Harry read this book outside school and enjoyed it so much that he lent it to Ms Leigh. Harry seems to suggest that Ms Leigh’s reformulation of William’s story is like a scene from Necropolis, in which the protagonist is almost run over by a “massive van”. Harry does not specify in what ways these two texts are similar (beyond the fact that both include a road accident), but Ms Leigh uses his comments to reinforce the point that the author is giving the reader just a hint of danger, an idea that she then applies to William’s story, inventing another way in which William could lead the reader to think that something bad may happen.

Another attempt at beginning the task is thwarted (308–337) After further interaction between Harry and Ms Leigh related to Necropolis, Ms Leigh attempts to bring the discussion to a close so that pupils can get on with their task: “right, I’m actually going to stop you there because otherwise we’re not going to have time” (lines 308–309). But William poses another challenge: “well something sort of goes wrong [in Necropolis] in that the truck’s about to hit her” (lines 321–322). This prompts Ms Leigh to further clarify what “suspense” means, illustrating the concept with a familiar example: if I stand behind you, and you’re talking and doing something you shouldn’t be, all of a sudden you kind of get that aahhh feeling, ‘she’s behind me’. And the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. That’s what we mean by suspense: we’re waiting for something to go wrong.

Dialogue and reasoning This episode is particularly rich in the sort of academically productive interactions we associate with dialogic pedagogy: the pupils and teacher challenge one another (e.g. William’s “I don’t like that, Miss” and Ms Forester’s “that happens every day … that’s quite normal”); they probe one another’s ideas (e.g. “you mean talk as the narrator or talk as the actors?”); clarify and elaborate their ideas (e.g. “but then … and then …”); build upon one another’s ideas (e.g. Harry’s introduction of the idea of a prologue, which is then taken up by William) and weave together academic and everyday concepts (e.g. “that’s what we mean by suspense: we’re waiting for something to go wrong”). They also bring together and explore multiple texts in order to develop their ideas (the texts acted out by Rachel and Terry, multiple versions of William’s text, The Fall, Necropolis). To quantify the density of these phenomenon, we coded the episode using the Cambridge Discourse Analysis Scheme (CDAS), thereby allowing us to compare this episode to a diverse national sample of 72 lessons (Vrikki, Wheatley, Howe, Hennessy, & Mercer, 2018).3 Select results of this exercise appear in Table 5.1. The episode indeed scores relatively high on reasoning moves and particularly high with regard to elaborations, in which participants clarify, build upon or elaborate their own or other’s contributions; querying, in which participants challenge, disagree with or cast doubt upon another’s statement and referring to ideas from outside the school context. However, while such an analysis of reasoning moves can give us a rough indication of the extent to which participants are exchanging and exploring ideas, it gives us a rather partial account of what is happening 69

Adam Lefstein and Julia Snell Table 5.1  Contrasting the episode with a national sample vis-à-vis occurrences of discourse moves associated with dialogic pedagogy Codesa

Mean occurrences per lesson in Vrikki and Occurrences in “story openers” episode colleagues’ national sample (standard deviation) (extrapolated to full lessonb)

Elaboration invitations

29.18 (17.66) 77.78 (37.2) 18.54 (13.9) 53.46 (20.89) 18.04 (12.88) 6.09 (6.37) 4.02 (4.69)

Elaboration Reasoning invitations Reasoning Querying Reference back Reference to wider context

28.64 190.94c 28.64 85.92 47.74c 9.54 85.92c

Notes: a  Code definitions can be found in Vrikki et al. (2018). b To correct for episode duration we multiplied the frequencies by 9.547 (extrapolating to a full 65.4-minute lesson from the 6.85-minute episode). c  The value is more than two standard deviations higher than the average value in the national sample.

in the episode. In what follows we illustrate this point through an examination of the ways in which the pupils and teacher manage their identities and relationships as they reason about the texts and story openers.

Managing identities and relationships Wortham (2006) argues that students and teachers engage in identity work while at the same time making sense of academic content: learning and identity processes are intertwined. Identity, in this view, is the way an individual is recognized by themselves and others as a certain “kind of person” (Gee, 2000, p. 99), for example, “a white working class boy”, a “quick learner”, “good at math” or “learning disabled”. Identities are co-constructed in interaction, as participants attribute identity categories to themselves and to others, assert their membership in particular groups, affirm or contest others’ identifications and otherwise work to construct and maintain their own and others’ identities. Such identity work can involve explicit identifications (“he’s so smart”) or more subtle cues, such as speaking in an academic register to identify oneself and one’s interlocuters as highly educated. Note that, in this sociocultural linguistic approach, identities emerge in interactional processes and are therefore “social and cultural rather than primarily internal psychological phenomen[a]” (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005). In line with this approach, we see the issue of who participates in classroom discourse and in what ways as being consequential for pupil identities and learning. Drawing on our ethnographic participant-observation in Ms Leigh’s classroom, we know that the two key pupil-participants in the focal episode – William and Harry – were confident, outgoing, popular with their peers and often at the center of classroom discussion (they were 70

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mentioned by name in field notes for 12 of the 13 lessons we observed in Ms Leigh’s classroom). These boys were often given special status in classroom activities (e.g. acting as team captains), and they were always among the first to volunteer for role-play and other kinds of classroom performances. In the episode, we see how their identities as strong pupils with authoritative voices are co-constructed in interaction; they are a product of the boys’ own behaviour and the ways in which they are identified by others. The most obvious example is William’s challenge to the teacher on line 33. Ms Leigh had set out her preferred model of story opening (dropping the reader in the action), which was to act as a model for the pupils’ next task. We see traces of the original lesson plan in Ms Leigh’s initial response to William’s challenge, in which she quickly moves to incorporate his comments within her predefined aims and structure. However, she stops herself mid-sentence in order to request clarification from William: “you mean talk as the narrator or talk as the actors?” (lines 40–41). At this point, it is evident that she is making space for William’s challenge, and she fully commits to this when she asks Rachel and Terry to sit down on line 63 and gives William the green light to continue, asking “what would you use to start off with- your story then, William?” (lines 65–66). In this line of questioning, there is not only a presupposition of pupil competence but also of accountability – William is positioned with responsibility for clarifying his ideas and for contributing to others’ thinking (Greeno, 2002, p. 5). Thus, William’s challenge, and importantly, his teacher’s uptake of this challenge, not only gives rise to the cognitive tension necessary for productive dialogue, it also reinforces William’s identity as a competent and authoritative student. Note that our focus here (and throughout the episode) is on the meaning that emerges in the interactional give-and-take, rather than on the intentions or actions of teacher or pupil on their own. Ms Leigh continues to interrogate William’s ideas. On lines 70–73, the test is whether or not William will start his story in the way that Ms Forester and Terry have already decided that they would not. Ms Leigh says, “because I’ve just overheard Ms Forester and Terry having a conversation about how they’re not going to start their story. Let’s see if he does it”. Ms Leigh, Ms Forester and Terry all share knowledge to which William is not privy, but William does not appear threatened by this. He simply gives his own example of a story opening. On line 143, Ms Leigh invites Ms Forester to compare William’s opening with another story, this time a published novel that she had read over the Christmas holiday. Ms Forester reveals that she “can’t even remember” what William’s story opening was (even though he read it out loud only a few seconds earlier). The comparison clearly does not work in William’s favour, but he is unfazed. Not only is William able to withstand challenges to his own thinking, he also interrogates the ideas of others. In lines 292 and 321–322, for example, William challenges Harry’s assessment of the opening to the book Necropolis (which Harry had introduced into the discussion on line 186). Harry had said earlier (on lines 223–227) that nothing actually goes wrong in the scene he recounted because the character of Scarlet is saved from being run over, but William contests this on two occasions (“something sort of goes wrong in that the truck’s about to hit her”), even reintroducing the topic on lines 314–324 after Ms Leigh had made an explicit attempt to shut the conversation down. In doing so, William reinforces his identity as a confident pupil, who is entitled to speak even after the teacher has decided to move on, while also pushing forward the discussion of suspense and foreshadowing that runs through the interaction (by prompting Ms Leigh’s explanation on lines 323–336). Harry also asserts his dominance in the episode. When he introduces Necropolis for the first time (on line 186), he claims coherence by prefacing his utterance with “Miss it’s like …”, thus suggesting that his comment relates directly to Ms Leigh’s dramatic reformulation of William’s story (on lines 165–182). But the reference of Harry’s “it” is ambiguous. Is he making a comparison between the opening to Necropolis and Ms Leigh’s retelling of William’s story? Or does 71

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his comment refer further back to Ms Leigh’s initial point that a good sentence opener drops the reader right in the action (lines 30–32), for this is how Necropolis begins: “The girl didn’t look before crossing the road”. Either way, it’s important to keep in mind that the other pupils have not read Necropolis; thus Harry’s contribution moves the discussion away from the common ground of William’s story and towards Harry’s own literary preferences. In trying to understand this new turn in the discussion, we must again reflect on the social (as well as ideational) aspects of the talk. Necropolis is a book that Harry had read and had then lent to Ms Leigh. Similarly, the holiday reading (The Fall) that Ms Leigh introduces on line 100 was given to her by Harry. These texts are thus not only materials for exploring issues related to suspense and foreshadowing but also a means through which Harry can signal his privileged position in the classroom as a pupil who shares books with the teacher. Ms Leigh and Harry’s shared interpretation of Necropolis (lines 239–273) further reinforces Harry’s identity as an advanced reader and connoisseur of novels. In summary, Harry and William are identified (and identify themselves) as competent and productive members of the classroom community and are encouraged to exercise “productive agency in their learning” (Greeno, 2002, p. 6). They open up the discussion of story writing to include multiple texts and conflicting voices, and in doing so, prompt sustained dialogue on the topics of suspense and foreshadowing. But to what extent could other pupils follow the complex layering of texts and ideas in this discussion? And to what extent are William and Harry themselves distracted by social concerns, compromising their understanding of the key issues? These two boys were friends but also keen competitors in the classroom, and this competition may have motivated at least some of their contributions. For example, when William hesitates on line 67, Harry immediately raises his hand and enthusiastically signals that he wishes to contribute. He puts his hand down only when the teacher says his name on line 100 and thereby shifts the focus onto him (and away from William), through the holiday reading. When William begins to speak on lines 108–109, Harry again raises his hand vigorously, competing for the floor. Equally, when Harry moves onto center stage with the discussion of Necropolis, William begins bidding for the floor, raising his hand on line 231 and only lowering it one minute later, when he has the opportunity to contradict Harry’s earlier interpretation of the book’s opening, which is that “nothing does go wrong, a man saves her” (lines 224–226). Here, and again on lines 321–323, William insists that “something sort of goes wrong”. Even though William has not read the book, he challenges Harry’s interpretation, which makes us wonder if perhaps William is more concerned with undermining Harry than with the substantive issues under discussion (see Swann, 2007, for another example of the use of ostensibly dialogic moves to pursue social purposes).

Some implications of linguistic ethnographic analysis for understanding dialogic pedagogy We used the analysis of the story openers discussion to illustrate a linguistic ethnographic approach to working with classroom interactional data. We demonstrated how teachers and pupils used language and communication to perform social alongside referential functions – for example, asserting identities and managing relationships while also challenging, elaborating and reasoning about ideas and texts. We also showed that social relations and identity issues critically shaped who participated in the episode, their positions in the discussion, their access to relevant epistemic resources (e.g. knowledge of the texts being discussed), and these factors shaped the unfolding discussion. Reasoning and knowledge construction were of course central to the

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e­ pisode, but provide a rather limited and perhaps even distorted view of what engaging in dialogue involves. Participating in dialogue involves formulating ideas and arguments, but also, and at the same time, navigating a complex and delicate social field. Moreover, the sort of dialogic teaching and learning we particularly value, that which is characterized by mutual challenge, disagreement and critique, intensifies the social risks and sensitivities. We focused primarily on identity work. Identity work is important for learning. Pupils who feel competent and authorized to contribute are better motivated to participate constructively in classroom dialogue. Conversely, pupils who feel incompetent, unappreciated or alienated are unlikely to be motivated or even available to engage in learning. Dialogic pedagogies, in particular, have complicated implications for classroom identity work. On the one hand, they call for an inclusive, egalitarian and caring environment, but on the other hand they emphasize cognitive challenge and give prominence to pupils’ authoritative voice and accountable participation. Taken together, these dialogic imperatives encourage teachers to draw reluctant or perceived “low ability” pupils onto a challenging classroom stage, on which their performance may be found wanting. In the episode we analysed here, the classroom dialogue publicly identified William and Harry as articulate and competent. Elsewhere in our data-set, similar pedagogical practices and expectations publicly identified other pupils as inarticulate and incompetent (we explore this issue in detail in Snell & Lefstein, 2018). By considering multiple dimensions of classroom activity (i.e. the content of discussion alongside social dynamics, power relations, communicative channels, language use, cultural and epistemic resources, spatial organization, etc.), a linguistic ethnographic perspective can highlight the multiple and competing demands dialogic pedagogy places upon the teacher and the dilemmas that arise as a result. For example, on the one hand, part of what makes the story opener episode dialogic is the sustained interaction between the teacher and just a small number of confident and enthusiastic pupils – with the rest of the class in the role of relatively passive observers. If Ms Leigh had attempted to open out the discussion to include all members of the class, the dialogic spell would likely have dissipated. On the other hand, if pupils not involved in center stage talk feel excluded from classroom discourse, they may come to see themselves as less competent students and become disengaged from their learning. Likewise, we were impressed by how Ms Leigh made space for pupil voices and especially their heterodox ideas. Such respect for voice is a central dialogic value. However, pursuing William and Harry’s ideas – and texts – amplified the complexity and manageability of the discussion, threatened topical coherence and undermined the original goal of the lesson. By raising these issues, we are not suggesting that Ms Leigh should have acted differently but rather that dialogic teaching is highly complex work, which requires sensitivity and judgement. Though not their intended use, coding schemes can advance a “best practice” approach to dialogic pedagogy (i.e. a higher score implies better teaching). A linguistic ethnographic perspective reminds us that teaching and learning through dialogue involves trade-offs: “dilemmas, not deficits” (Alexander, 2004, p. 25). In conclusion, we should clarify that, though it has been rhetorically expedient to set linguistic ethnographic analysis against discourse coding, we see both methodologies as playing important roles and indeed as complementary. Coding is critical for quantifying variables, for managing a large data set and for identification of trends across multiple lessons, teachers and schools. It can also help guide the selection of episodes for detailed micro-analysis. Linguistic ethnographic analysis can help in the interpretation of quantitative findings: clarifying codes’ situated meanings (including for participants), exploring anomalies and offering a multi-dimensional and holistic understanding of the complexities of classroom dialogue.

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Notes 1 Note that not all of the researchers cited here would call themselves “linguistic ethnographers”, nor have they all focused on dialogic pedagogy. Nevertheless, we identify their work as broadly aligned with the principles, concepts and methods described and believe that their insights are valuable for the study of dialogic pedagogy. 2 This episode is the focus of Chapter 5, which also includes commentaries by Robin Alexander, Gemma Moss, Greg Thompson and Laura Hughes. A video of the episode may be viewed at https://youtu.be/ t97xdo0sBD8. The full transcript is available at http://dialogicpedagogy.com/episode-2-i-dont-reallylike-that-miss/. 3 We would like to thank Elisa Calcagni for guidance on using CDAS and indeed for checking our coding.

References Alexander, R. J. (2004). Talk for Learning:The Second Year. North Yorkshire County Council. Alexander, R. J. (2008). Essays on Pedagogy. London: Routledge. Aukerman, M. (2013). Rereading comprehension pedagogies: Toward a dialogic teaching ethic that honors student sensemaking. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 1: A1–A31. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bezemer, J., & Jewitt, C. (2010). Multimodal analysis. In L. Litosseliti (Ed.), Research Methods in Linguistics (pp: 180–197). London: Continuum. Bloome, D., Carter, S. P., Christian, B. M., Otto, S., & Shuart-Faris, N. (2005). Discourse Analysis & the Study of Classroom Language & Literacy Events: A Microethnographic Perspective. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Blumer, H. (1954). What is wrong with social theory? American Sociological Review, 19(1), 3–10. Boyd, M. P., & Markarian, W. C. (2011). Dialogic teaching: Talk in service of a dialogic stance. Language and Education, 25(6), 515–534. Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614. Burawoy, M. (1998). The extended case method. Sociological Theory, 16(1), 4–33. Castanheira, M. L., Green, J., Dixon, C., & Yeager, B. (2007). (Re)formulating identities in the face of fluid modernity: An interactional ethnographic approach. International Journal of Educational Research, 46(3), 172–189. Copland, F. & Creese, A. (2015). Linguistic Ethnography: Collecting, Analysing and Presenting Data. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Duff, P. A. (2004). Intertextuality and hybrid discourses: The infusion of pop culture in educational discourse. Linguistics and Education, 14(3–4), 231–276. Duranti, A., & Goodwin, C. (1992). Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gee, J. P. (2000). Identity as an analytic lens for research in education. Review of Research in Education, 25(1), 99–125. Godfrey, L., & O’Connor, M. C. (1995). The vertical hand span: Nonstandard units, expressions, and symbols in the classroom. The Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 14(3), 327–345. Green, J. L., & Bloome, D. (1997). A situated perspective on ethnography and ethnographers of and in education. In S. B. Heath, J. Flood & D. Lapp (Eds.), Handbook for Research in the Communicative and Visual Arts. New York: Macmillan. Greeno, J. G. (2002). Students with Competence, Authority, and Accountability: Affording Intellective Identities in Classrooms. New York: The College Board. Gutierrez, K., Rymes, B., & Larson, J. (1995). Script, counterscript, and underlife in the classroom – Brown, James Versus Brown V Board-of-Education. Harvard Educational Review, 65(3), 445–471. Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Horowitz, A. (2008). Necropolis. London: Walker Books. Kelly, G., Crawford, T., & Green, J. (2001). Common task and uncommon knowledge: Dissenting voices in the discursive construction of physics across small laboratory groups. Linguistics and Education, 12(2), 135–174.

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Linguistic ethnographic analysis Lefstein, A., & Snell, J. (2011). Promises and problems of teaching with popular culture: A linguistic ethnographic analysis of discourse genre mixing in a literacy lesson. Reading Research Quarterly, 46(1), 40–69. Lefstein, A., & Snell, J. (2014). Better than Best Practice: Developing Teaching and Learning Through Dialogue. Abingdon: Routledge. Maybin, J. (2006). Children’s Voices:Talk, Knowledge, and Identity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McDermott, R. P., & Gospodinoff, K. (1979). Social context for ethnic borders and school failure. In A. Wolfgang (Ed.), Nonverbal Behavior: Applications and Cultural Implications (pp. 175–195). New York: Academic Press. Nix, G. (2000). The Fall. New York: Scholastic. Nystrand, M., Gamoran, A., Kachur, R., & Prendergast, C. (1997). Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. O’Connor, M. C. (1996). Managing the intermental: Classroom group discussion and the social context of learning. In D. I. Slobin, J. Gerhardt, A. Kyratzis & J. Guo (Eds.), Social Interaction, Social Context and Language (pp. 495–509). Hillsdale, MI: Lawrence Erlbaum. O’Connor, M. C., & Michaels, S. (1993). Aligning academic task and participation status through revoicing: Analysis of a classroom discourse strategy. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 24(4), 318–335. Park, J. Y., Michaels, S., Arancibia, E., Diaz Lembert, D., Dimanche, S., Moon, A., & Sanchez, K. (2017). Poetry Inside Out as multiliteracies pedagogy: An inquiry by youth researchers and university researchers. In F. Serafini & E. Gee (Eds.), Remixing Multiliteracies: Theory and Practice from New London to New Times (pp. 62–73). New York: Teachers College Press. Rampton, B. (2006). Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, B. (2007). Neo-hymesian linguistic ethnography in the United Kingdom. Journal of Sociolin­ guistics, 11(5), 584–607. Rampton, B., & Harris, R. (2010). Change in urban classroom culture and interaction. In K. Littleton & C. Howe (Eds.), Educational Dialogues: Understanding and Promoting Productive Interaction (pp. 240–264). Abingdon: Routledge. Rampton, B., Maybin, J., & Roberts, C. (2015). Methodological foundations in linguistic ethnography. In J. Snell, S. Shaw & F. Copland (Eds.), Linguistic Ethnography: Interdisciplinary Explorations (pp. 14–50). London: Palgrave. Resnick, L. B., Asterhan, C. S. C., & Clarke, S. N. (2015). Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Segal, A., & Lefstein, A. (2016). Exuberant, voiceless participation: An unintended consequence of dialogic sensibilities? L1 Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 16. doi:10.17239/l1esll-2016.16.02.06 Segal, A., Snell, J., & Lefstein, A. (2017). Dialogic teaching to the high-stakes standardised test? Research Papers in Education, 32(5), 596–610. Silverstein, M., & Urban, G. (1996). Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Snell, J., & Lefstein, A. (2018). “Low ability,” participation, and identity in dialogic pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 55(1), 40–78. Snell, J., Shaw, S., & Copland, F. (2015). Linguistic Ethnography: Interdisciplinary Explorations. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Swann, J. (2007). Designing ‘educationally effective’ discussion. Language and Education, 21(4), 342–359. Tusting, K. (forthcoming). The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Ethnography. Routledge. Vrikki, M.,Wheatley, L., Howe, C., Hennessy, S., & Mercer, N. (2018). Dialogic practices in primary school classrooms. Language and Education, 1–19. doi:10.1080/09500782.2018.1509988 Wortham, S. E. F. (2006). Learning Identity: The Joint, Local Emergence of Social Identification and Academic Learning. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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6 COLLABORATIVE ARGUMENTATIONBASED LEARNING Michael J. Baker, Jerry Andriessen and Baruch B. Schwarz

Introduction Following Aristotelian dialectic, the organised rational resolution of philosophical disputes had its place in European education during the mediæval period, within Christian religious training, alongside dictation, copying and rote learning of sacred texts. Disputes on the interpretation of texts were also organised within Jewish religious education in yeshiva schools but in this case in the form of dyadic discussions (Schwarz & Baker, 2017, Chapter 2). Following the Industrial Revolution, such practices were absent from secular state education organised for the masses, within classrooms managed under the authority of the teacher. Highly ritualised resolution of pre-defined disputes survived at university level, in the form of debating societies that prepared the protagonists for participation in public life. It took the societal erosion of authority, in the decades following the Second World War, for students’ authentic and sometimes conflicting voices to be heard again in school, within work in small groups. This has been studied by collaborative learning research (Dillenbourg, Baker, Blaye & O’Malley, 1996), with the aim of identifying the types of interpersonal interactions that are the most constructive (with respect to knowledge elaboration) and productive (of learning).Within this approach, there are three main reasons for focussing on the study of argumentative interactions. Firstly, reasoned collective argumentation represents a paragon of intellectual inquiry that has been claimed to be essential to scientific practice (Osborne, 2010). For those who argue for closer alignment of educational and professional practices, this would imply making education a more argumentative activity. Secondly, argumentative interactions arguably involve greater intellectual, cognitive-linguistic and interactive work on the part of student participants than in the case of more irenic exchanges, possibly involving facile acceptance and/or compromise. Thus, students who find their views contested would be led to reflect, to explain, to critically examine their opinions and creatively find (counter-)arguments, the working hypothesis being that such socio-cognitively intense activities are beneficial in educational terms. Finally, in the wake of the theory of socio-cognitive conflict (Doise, Mugny & Perret-Clermont, 1975), it was conjectured that the processes by which verbal conflicts may be cooperatively resolved (Mevarech & Light, 1992) in argumentative interactions hold the key to understanding cognitive progress. The research direction in collaborative learning research that pursues this conjecture is called “Collaborative Argumentation-Based Learning” (“CABLE”),1 or more simply (in opposition 76

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to “learning to argue”), arguing to learn (e.g. Andriessen, Baker & Suthers, 2003; Andriessen & Baker, 2014). CABLE research focuses on fine-grained qualitative analysis of students’ interactions in order to understand how the processes of argumentation and knowledge co-elaboration are intertwined. It uses such understanding as a basis for defining the subtle learning outcomes involved, the methods by which they may be evaluated and the design of educational situations that favour such processes and outcomes. From the outset, CABLE research was associated with the elaboration and study of computer tools that enabled interaction via networks and use of shared workspaces, for co-writing argumentative texts and co-creating diagrams for representing argumentative structures (Andriessen & Baker, 2013) in a “space of debate” (Baker, Quignard, Lund & Séjourné, 2003). Such tool-mediated situations extend, on the one hand, the field of study to larger, geographically distributed and culturally diverse collectives and, on the other hand, provide effective research tools for the collection of interaction corpora to be analysed. The study of CABLE in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL, Koschmann, 1996) also enabled new research questions to be more precisely defined and pursued, including how to provide tools for making students more aware of their own participation in the interaction, as well as for teachers to manage and scaffold online groups. Although this chapter is not specifically about such technologies for CABLE, a general vision of this research issue is presented below. To the extent that argumentative interaction (or, as we will sometimes write, “argumentation dialogue”) between students can be seen as a specific genre of educational interaction, CABLE research can be seen as participating in the numerous attempts to define (“good”, or educationally effective) types of educational dialogue. Examples include the work of Mercer, Wegerif and Dawes (1999) on “types of talk”, the evocation of “dialogic argumentation” by Kuhn and Crowell (2011) and of “accountable talk” by Resnick, Asterhan and Clarke (2017). However, in CABLE research, the type of argumentative interaction to be fostered and studied is collaborative and deliberative, rather than adversarial or functioning on a largely interpersonal plane (Schwarz & Baker, 2017); it refers to a mixed genre, involving argumentation, the co-construction of understanding and knowledge and the effective regulation of affect (Baker, Andriessen & Järvelä, 2013). This chapter provides a brief overview of CABLE research, focussing on the nature of constructive argumentative interactions (Baker, 1999), principles for design of situations that favour them and the integration of CABLE into educational practice. The main characteristics and tenets of CABLE research that will be developed in the rest of the chapter are: (1) a focus on qualitative interaction analysis of cognitive-linguistic processes; (2) the aim of integrating argumentation theory (van Eemeren, Grootendorst & Snoek Henkemans, 1996) and collaborative learning theories, with two-way implications for each (Baker, 2015); (3) the extension of teaching domains under study, beyond STEM to include the social sciences and humanities and (4) the integration of other relevant dimensions of interaction, such as the expression and regulation of affect.

Collaborative argumentation dialogue There are many theories of argumentation (see van Eemeren et al., 1996), which variously see it as discourse strategically organised to persuade, to convince by quasi-logical reasoning or simply to decide what should be accepted, as the outcome of a rule-governed dialogue game. In CABLE research, we adopt a theory that is appropriate to argumentation in collaborative dialogue. In the first instance, argumentation is a means for trying to lead people to accept what you say. 77

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In many European languages, the words argument and argumentation derive from the word “argumentum” in ecclesiastical Latin. The word has two parts: the prefix “argu-”, that comes from the verb “arguer”, and the suffix “-mentum”. “Arguer” means to point out or to bring to acknowledge. The suffix “-mentum” refers to the way, the means, the instrument or technique by which the verb to which it is attached is realised, for example: “monumentum” (a means for remembering), “alimentum” (a means for nourishment), “documentum” (a means for informing). Therefore, “argumentum”, argumentation is … a means for leading people to accept or to acknowledge what you say (Rigotti & Greco Morasso, 2009), which presupposes that they do not already do so, such non-acceptance being, in dialogue, the opening of a verbal confrontation between discourses and persons, organised around an emerging disputed question or issue. To accept (rather than to believe) in dialogue is essentially to cooperate in building shared reasoning on the basis of what is accepted (Cohen, 1992). In sum, argumentation in CABLE is a type of dialogue oriented towards jointly deciding what should be accepted, by means of exploring arguments for and against views. What is a dialogue, when does a dialogue become argumentative, when does argumentation become a dialogue and when does an argumentation dialogue become collaborative? Etymologically, the word “dialogue” comes from Greek (dia-logos), which means through (dia-) words or thoughts (logos). Dialogue is a means whereby, through linguistic or other types of communication, we influence each other in order to coordinate (share) factual, emotive and volitional information for more or less joint purposes (Allwood, 1997, p. 222). It seems easy to assume that a dialogue becomes argumentative when the “influencing” comes closer to “convincing” or “accepting the ideas of the other”. This leads some proponents of dialogues to include the “convincing” aspect in their own approach to dialogue (e.g. Abma et al., 2001). Argumentation and dialogue may serve similar goals in education, where they are instrumental for achieving (monological) educational goals (Matusov & Wegerif, 2014). This may imply the belief in educational practice that argumentation may have a predictable outcome, one side of the argument holding more truth than the other. When debating societal issues, for example, this may not necessarily be the case. With such predicaments, dialogues (of various types) may become argumentative when the point to be made is in need of deeper reflection by the other side. There may be other means to promote reflection by the other, for example by provocation or joking, but argumentation is a more serious invitation for broadening and deepening ideas. Under certain conditions that we will specify next there are specific learning processes associated with dialogic argumentation. Argumentation can be monological, as in the case where a lawyer makes a plea to prove a defendant innocent. In such cases, the people that the argumentation is addressed to are not expected to discuss but to either agree or disagree at the end of the monologue. All and any texts or utterances are dialogical, since speakers or writers have virtual audiences (more or less) in mind and a set of different voices orchestrate any monologue (Bakhtin, 1986). Furthermore, monologues do not necessarily have to be one-sided, since they could also imply balanced two-sided argumentation. The study of argumentation, as proposed by Toulmin (1958) or in pragma-dialectics (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1984), is essentially the study of monological argumentation, whether in texts, speeches or, indeed, dialogues. Argumentation dialogue as understood in CABLE, as both a dialectical and a dialogical form of dialogue, therefore, appears as a relatively new branch to the tree of argumentation theories (see also the next section of this chapter).

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Argumentation dialogues can be more or less collaborative. Three essential characteristics of collaboration can be identified (Andriessen & Baker, in preparation): (1) it should happen under conditions of equality of rights and opportunities to intervene (despite obvious d­ ifferences between individuals); (2) participants share the goal of arriving at some joint objective, and jointly coordinate in its achievement (goals) and (3) participants (cognitively and ethically) consider and acknowledge each other’s contributions (processes). This does not imply that participants agree or always reach agreement. Enemies can also collaborate in trying to convince each other (at least in theory), although in practice they are more likely to engage in adversarial argumentation, without a joint purpose and probably with little mutual respect. Collaboration is an activity during which participants consider and value each other’s contributions and monitor joint progress. A collaborative argumentative dialogue, then, can be considered as a form of dialogue, a coordinated stream of utterances carrying forward arguments for a joint purpose, which may evolve and change during its course. This includes emotional and relational aspects of the dialogue, as people are sensitive creatures and have some expectations about how to be treated by others. This also relates to the content put forward: contributions may be acknowledged but still interpreted in a way that does harm or injustice to the original intentions underlying them. Between human beings, dialogues should proceed according to ethical maxims (Allwood,Traum & Jokinen, 2000), such as acting freely, helping rather than preventing the other to contribute, sincerely providing correct information and so on. Do such dialogues have a recognisable format that can be evaluated in terms of its effectiveness? In fact, we do not refer to a single type of (argumentation) dialogue here; rather, we are proposing a family of types of dialogue, to be defined not only according to their particular goals but also to their conditions and processes. Formally then, this would allow evaluating contributions to a dialogue according to their suitability to it. Several types of dialogue have been distinguished by other scholars, and it seems that our typology crosscuts them. An important typology for argumentative dialogues is proposed by Walton and Krabbe (2011), who distinguish persuasion, negotiation, deliberation, informationseeking and eristic dialogue types, all of which may or may not be collaborative to some extent. These types are defined according to their goals, which also qualify as the basis for evaluating suitability of contributions to the dialogue. For example, persuasion attempts to clarify a conflict by providing the strongest arguments in favour of, and the strongest objections against, a case. The “negotiation” type of dialogue appears to be more collaborative, where a settlement is sought on which both parties can agree. Deliberation considers all alternatives for a particular solution. The goal of information-seeking is transfer of information, which seems to violate the equality principle of collaboration to some extent. The degree to which such disparity is linked to status differences will mark the dialogue as more or less collaborative. Eristic dialogue involves settling issues in a personal relationship, which most likely will create tensions in the consideration criterion. Another well-known classification of “types of talk” has been developed in the domain of education, by Mercer (1996). The first type of talk is “disputational”, characterised by disagreement and individualised decision making, notably in short exchanges consisting of assertions and counter-assertions. Nothing seems to be built up; there is no argumentation. Next there is “cumulative” talk, in which speakers build positively but uncritically on what the other has said. This seems neither argumentative nor collaborative; there seems to be no serious consideration of what the other has said. The third type seems collaborative; it is called exploratory talk, where partners engage critically yet constructively with each other’s

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ideas. The purpose of the classification is not to evaluate separate contributions but to capture analytic types of talk that link to ways of thinking and learning in the classroom. In the same sense we can say that a collaborative argumentative dialogue may encompass all these types of talk or be a part of each.

Learning processes and outcomes relating to collaborative argumentation dialogue In the context of CABLE research, we adopt a situated (Greeno & Engeström, 2014) and discursive (Edwards & Potter, 1992) vision of learning, whereby thinking, conceptual understanding, are inseparable from their expression in collective language-based activities (Allwood, 1997). Thereby, learning corresponds to a stable change in an interactant’s discourse over a given time interval. Such a time interval cannot be specified in advance (dialogue is an intrinsically open process) and may correspond to an interactive encounter, lasting a little over an hour, for example, or the distance across two successive encounters, perhaps separated by a week or more (or years). “Learning in Dialogue” can also be seen from a Vygotskian perspective, as a process of appropriation of the interlocutor’s discourse, that the learner then consistently takes as a basis or premise (Trognon & Batt, 2003) for further joint reasoning. What, therefore, are the types of learning, qua discursive (cognitive-linguistic) changes, that are specifically, or particularly, associated with argumentation dialogues produced in educational situations? As we shall discuss, the nature of such changes depends on what the dialogue is about, its topic or universe of reference, on the nature of its situation and dialogical organisation. We restrict our discussion to three types of inter-discursive changes: epistemic change in view, conceptual-discursive change and inter-personal change. The definition of each draws on both argumentation theory and theories in the Learning Sciences.

Epistemic change in view The expression “change in view” is inspired by the work of Harman (1986), on foundational and cohesive models of change in belief. In addition to belief, many other cognitive-dialogical attitudes have been defined, such as “opinion”, “commitment”, “acceptance”, “assent” and “concession”. For our purposes, we shall consider these in terms of the extent to which a speaker in dialogue creates either proximity or else distance between his or her view and the statement or proposition in question (a distance that can of course evolve during dialogue), for example by the use of verbs such as “to think”, “to consider”, “to be certain” or sure and adverbs such as “possibly”, “probably”, as well as pronouns such as “I” or “you” or “it”. In sum, epistemic change in view is change in the extent to which a person maintains, holds (or believes, accepts, etc.) a view, statement, proposition: if, at the beginning of an argumentative discussion, I maintain firmly that Lionel Messi is the greatest footballer who has ever lived, but at the end of our discussion I express openness and/or uncertainty about this (perhaps it is Zinedine Zidane or Diego Maradona?), then an epistemic change in my view has occurred. Analysing change in view involves establishing links between the dialectical dimension (Barth & Krabbe, 1982) and the rhetorical dimension (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958) of argumentation, in other words, between characteristics of the dialogue game of exchanging argumentative moves leading to a certain outcome (win, lose, draw, compromise) and the extent to which participants give their assent to the theses under discussion. Intuitively, the most obvious case, with respect to a protagonist (“X”) in argumentation dialogue who initially proposed

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and defended a proposal “p”, would be where X subsequently maintains p in the case where it is successfully defended or else rejects it when it is clearly refuted (or conversely, X who initially rejected p comes to accept it following its successful defence). In other terms: change in view would be a simple function of dialectical outcomes. This is possible but probably rare, since, if people do in fact consider a point worth arguing, they probably have some degree of commitment to their own views. Furthermore, students’ changes in views are usually not “all or nothing”; they are not always a simple rational function of dialectical processes, and they depend on the nature of the domain of discourse. Thus, as a result of argumentation dialogue, students may come to have less Manichean views, in that they may come to at least doubt their initial certainties and have elaborated more subtle, concessive views, integrating counter-arguments. Acceptance, rejection, belief and nonbelief do not always follow simple numerical rules, of the type “the more I accept arguments/ counter-arguments for/against my views, the more/less I hold on to them”. For example, Baker (2009) analysed a case study of a computer-mediated debate on the acceptability of GeneticallyModified Organisms (GMOs) in which one student who initially stated she was neither “for” nor “against”, came to realise that she was, from her own stated point of view, in reality “for”, as a result of having conceded several counter-arguments (n.b. the “rational” effect should have been to move from incertitude to being “against”, when accepting more counter-arguments). It is possible that attitude changes differ according to whether the domain of the debate is “scientific”, in the narrow sense of the term (e.g. calculation of electrical current in a circuit) or else intrinsically value-laden, notably with respect to socio-scientific questions. In the former case, the very possibility of debate can lead students to claim that “it can’t be right” (de Vries, Lund & Baker, 2002) and thus weaken their attitudes (Baker, 2003), whereas views based on fundamental human values would be much more stable. In sum, how and why students change their attitudes towards proposals in argumentative situations is obviously important for collaborative learning, since what is at stake is quite simply the ideas that are, to a certain degree, either retained or rejected.

Conceptual-discursive change Argumentation dialogue is not only an exchange of (counter-)arguments but is also an occasion for intense negotiation of meaning and transformation of conceptualisations in discourse. Such processes can operate at all or any stages of an argumentative discussion: opening, confrontation, argumentation or closing (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1984). In the opening confrontation, questions debated and theses proposed or critiqued are rarely fixed once and for all: they are gradually co-constructed (Sitri, 2003) and evolve during the debate, in terms of the way that they are conceptualised.Walton (1992) gives the example of an everyday discussion involving, at first, a debate about the advisability of obligatory tipping in restaurants in the USA, that gradually evolves by the conceptual operation of generalisation to the (more fundamental) question of the role of the state in regulating commercial affairs. Within argumentation itself, various conceptual associations and dissociations can occur (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958). For example, in the science classroom, students might be led to dissociate the notion of “vibration” from that of “movement” or to associate “energy loss in movement and at impact” as two types of the same phenomenon, “friction” (Baker, 2002). As a possible argumentative outcome, students may co-construct compromise solutions, involving more or less principled combinations of their individual solutions. Thus, at the very heart of argumentative interactions are processes involving conceptual transformation, negotiation of meaning and knowledge co-construction.

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There is of course no guarantee that such inter-discursive transformations will produce outcomes corresponding to epistemic norms. Obviously, epistemic and conceptual-discursive changes interact with each other: the extent to which I accept a statement depends on what is meant by it.

Inter-personal (ego-allo-centric) changes Thus far in this chapter we have considered changes in individuals’ views as well as in shared discourse, within argumentative interactions. But an additional perspective on CABLE needs to be considered, that of the origin of change, i.e. whether it is egocentric, originating in personal reflexion within one’s own views, or else allocentric, originating in the interlocutor’s views. To state the matter simply: to what extent does exchange and mutual acquisition of arguments occur? The process of egocentric change can be described in terms of the two following cases: (1) when my viewpoint is criticised, whether I accept counter-arguments to it or not, this initiates a process of personal reflexion and knowledge restructuring, akin to epistemic and conceptual change; (2) in response to critique, I am lead to generate and make explicit the foundations of my views, this being a process that produces knowledge restructuring by processes akin to the self-other-explanation effect (Ploetzner, Dillenbourg, Praier & Traum, 1999). Allocentric change corresponds to the acceptance and appropriation of the discourse of the interlocutor. This may well not be a wholesale process, in that appropriation involves transformation, such as in the case where a viewpoint becomes more concessive, possibly recognising yet neutralising counter-arguments. Viewing CABLE in terms of discourses of the interlocutor can go much deeper than a process of appropriation, since discourse itself is not purely monological, rather it is dialogical (see the present chapter, previously mentioned), in the sense of Bakhtine (1929/1977), putting into play multiple voices (Wertsch, 1991). The “dialogical student” of CABLE is one who is open to the circulation of alternative discourses and voices, is willing to juxtapose and examine them critically and searches for coherence.

Other dimensions of change and learning outcomes So far, we have considered CABLE processes in terms of epistemic, conceptual, dialectical and dialogical dimensions. But the confrontation of discourses and persons in argumentation dialogue is also clearly a situation that is potentially face-threatening (Muntig & Turnbull, 1998), thereby involving more or less strong affects (Baker et al., 2013). A critique of one’s views, whether ad hominem or not, is usually also perceived to some extent as a critique of oneself. The ability to engage in effective social regulation of affect, thus enabling deepening of the cognitive problem at hand, is thus a type of learning that is particularly important if argumentative interactions are to be constructive and productive (Isohätälä, Näykki, Järvelä & Baker, 2018). Clearly, certain topics for debate may be more “hot” than others, especially when they involve personal identities and value systems anchored in particular social groups and personal or family history (Schwarz & Goldberg, 2013). It is important here to also consider what will probably not change (over a relatively short time range, from weeks to months) as a result of participating in (argumentation) dialogue. What will probably not change are fundamental value systems and personal identities. It is unlikely that an ecologist will, as a result of a single argumentation dialogue, wholeheartedly espouse a “capitalistic progress of science and society view”, nor that an Asheknazi become Sepharadic (Schwarz & Goldberg, ibid.). It is impossible to determine the timescale of learning in advance (Lemke, 2000). Therefore, a single dialogic encounter might resonate in the mind and lead to cognitive change years later. 82

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In conclusion to this rapid review of the processes of CABLE, we summarise some of the subtle or elusive learning outcomes with which it may be particularly associated: (1) change in view (of networks of beliefs, opinions, assents, their degrees); (2) change in conceptualisations of the universe of reference; (3) being able to better regulate affect in argumentative interaction and (4) becoming more dialogical, open to alternative discourses and searching for coherence. For (1) and (2), research has developed appropriate methods of analysis, but for (3) and (4), precise analytical criteria are not yet fully specified. But in all these cases, evaluation of CABLE in practical pedagogical situations presents major difficulties for teachers (see next), not least because extended interactions, rather than products issuing from them, would need to be analysed and evaluated.

Argumentative design and educational practice Multiple dimensions Argumentative design is a burgeoning multi-dimensional domain of research (Andriessen & Schwarz, 2009), which raises hopes about the implementation of constructive and productive practices of talk in classrooms. The hopes originate from the fact that two related criteria of productivity have been identified: the discourse is an instance of collaborative-deliberative argumentation, and it leads to subsequent individual learning gains. The recognition of the importance of collaborative-deliberative argumentation has not yet provided clear answers concerning how to create propitious conditions for its deployment. However, we mention that the efforts invested in argumentative design have engendered highly valuable practices such as the scaffolding of argumentation (with proper scripts) and the facilitation of multiple discussions or the repositioning of texts as resources for inquiry and argumentation in group-work. For all these promising directions, technologies have been designed and used. We review the central role of technologies in CABLE research.

A vision of technology At the time Brown, Scardamalia and Bereiter’s revolutionary ideas that equated learning with co-construction (or co-building) of knowledge (Brown & Campione, 1990; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003) infiltrated the scientific community, computer tools emerged to represent argumentation: Learning Sciences researchers found in argumentative components natural building blocks with which to represent co-construction of knowledge.The use of these new tools led to the emergence of new practices: discussions that occurred online generated artefacts in the form of argumentative maps or diagrams (mostly based on extensions of those of Toulmin, 1958, and, later, Suthers and Hundhausen, 2003) that enabled the summarising of discussions, collective reflection on the quality of discussions or peer evaluation of arguments and moves in discussions (Schwarz, 2018). In spite of these possibilities, unguided small groups rarely achieved high-level argumentation (e.g. de Vries et al., 2002). A typical support includes three text boxes (claim, warrant, qualifier), which are arranged into one message or argumentation script.The scripts ask learners to post arguments, counterarguments and syntheses. The design of the environments developed unearthed important ideas (e.g. the concept of “representational guidance”: Suthers, 2003) but implementations mostly occurred in non-authentic contexts and without regard to whether or to what extent learners needed the supports provided by the scripts or ontologies with which they were provided. Recent developments have improved the relevance of technology-based CABLE to learning in schools. Firstly, new environments were developed to enable the moderation of multiple 83

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groups (e.g. the Argunaut system – Schwarz & Asterhan, 2011). Secondly, the adaptive long-term implementation of argumentative activities in classrooms, which was missing in the beginning of research in CABLE, was carried out in various “blended learning” settings, involving, for example, guided and unguided, online as well as offline discussions in small groups, individual argumentative writing or teacher-led whole-class discussions. In such contexts, e-discussions typically become secondary learning artefacts (maps, texts, interaction traces) to be used as resources for further reflexive activities, on the part of both learners and teachers. Kuhn, Goh, Iordanou and Shaenfield (2008) implemented a long-term blended setting in which computer-supported argumentation is central and designed an extended (three-year, twice weekly) curriculum in philosophy in order to afford intensive practice in dialogic argumentation for middle-school students (Crowell & Kuhn, 2014). In a recent study, Schwarz and Shahar (2017) helped a history teacher to design a yearlong experiment in which his students were “encultured” into historical reasoning through the extensive implementation of various argumentative activities. Instruction was blended as unguided e-discussions (generally around historical texts) alternating with argumentative writing and face-to-face teacher-led whole-class discussions in which all groups compared and discussed the different conclusions they reached. These two studies function as examples that show that instruction based on intensive computer-supported CABLE can be effective when settings are blended. Such studies are, however, rare.

Integration of CABLE into educational practices, curricula Although, as mentioned previously, CABLE has been shown to be highly beneficial for learning and development (see Schwarz & Baker, 2017, Chapter 6 for a synthesis of results), many challenges are faced by its integration in schools. The first challenge is institutional. The educational system functions as a brake with respect to societal change, since it incorporates traditions of previous generations. In other words, it is not prepared for systemic changes, because educational practices are enacted by generations of teachers who were once students themselves. Talk practices in schools are generally poor. They may be controlled and orchestrated in classroom activities with 20 to 40 students. By contrast, the implementation of argumentative activities necessitates the intensive enactment of small-group work. Guidance is necessary, a fact that turns this setting towards the impracticable in regular classroom activities. In addition, the implementation of argumentative activities demands considerable time in comparison with teaching practices based on narration. The implementation of argumentative activities brings forth an additional institutional challenge: the evaluation system imposes administration of examinations that reduce learning to the restitution of pieces of information acquired during consecutive activities. This rhythm of learning activities, punctuated by frequent examinations in which items are atomised, fits well with a view of our society as a society of production, even in the educational realm. The second challenge is curricular. The integration of argumentative activities in learning tasks brings doubt, incertitude or bewilderment – states of mind that characterise CABLE activities – to learning tasks. The traditional organisation of learning tasks in domains such as mathematics, science or even history demands the student to act in a domain where uncertainty generally is a sign of weakness, whilst mastery and control reign. Beyond the organisational aspect of the curriculum, its design aspect is particularly challenging, for example in mathematics (Schwarz, Heshkowitz & Prusak, 2010). The third challenge is pedagogical. Even in the case where teachers are able to focus on one group only, scaffolding and structuring argumentation requires them to pay attention to all contributions and to choose ways to intervene (e.g. through generic vs. specific hints) in order 84

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to improve the quality of the unfolding discussion, without over-imposing themselves. But this role is so complicated that teachers risk ceasing to manage the elaboration of knowledge. The pedagogical challenge becomes more pronounced as argumentative activities follow each other: the scaffolding of argumentation is ideally intended to foster autonomy among learners. Without guidance students may tend to reach a quick consensus about conclusions that they do not necessarily share. Another pedagogical challenge concerns the status of the teacher: the subtle role that scaffolding and structuring demands from teachers may lead them to the feeling that they have lost power and authority (Reeve, 2009). Indeed, they need to be at the same time caring and nonintrusive; interventions in which they clearly declare what is right should be rare. Moreover, the resources they provide for the engagement of students in argumentation often convey a pluralistic picture, which contrasts with the authority of canonical (and generally monological) texts and, to a large extent, with the authority of the teacher as the guarantor of official knowledge. The fourth challenge is ideological. Some proponents of argumentation in education hold anti-rationalist post-modernist views. Such an approach is particularly apposite in the humanities. For example, in the learning of history, some theorists opt for bringing to the public sphere different narratives without evaluating them. Here the problem is not only pedagogical but also ideological. Should the teacher prefer rational thinking at the expense of valuing different voices or even voices of a particular in-group (e.g. national glorification) in a non-judgemental way? This problem is exacerbated especially in the context of multi-culturalism, which is spreading rapidly in democracies. Multi-culturalism naturally brings forward discussions aiming at presenting social identities rather than at deciding on best opinions according to criteria pertaining to critical reasoning. This issue arises not only in history classes but also in domains such as literature and civic education or in any domain in which humanistic ideals, values and norms are at stake. Such a change finds decision makers and pedagogues unprepared, especially in relation to classroom discussions in which argumentation can be enacted.

Concluding summary and reflexions In this chapter we have presented an overview of a particular research direction, emerging from and within collaborative learning research, that we have termed “Collaborative ArgumentationBased Learning”, or “CABLE”. Its main defining characteristic is the search for an operational definition of collaborative-deliberative argumentation dialogue, this being a mixed genre that interweaves dialectical and dialogical dimensions with cumulative and exploratory processes of knowledge co-elaboration. Furthermore, CABLE research emphasises the study of such complex cognitive-linguistic processes in dialogues that involve an interpersonal ethics of mutual respect and the mutual regulation of the interactive circulation of affect. Careful analyses carried out in this framework have brought to light knowledge elaboration and learning processes that are particularly associated with such dialogues. As discussed previously, the implementation of teaching programmes in schools faces many challenges, for students, teachers and curricula. Notwithstanding such challenges, could ideal situations for constructive and productive CABLE be designed? Research has identified general guidelines in this direction, but it is clear that there are limits to the predictability of any dialogue, especially when its participants are discussing the novel issues that are the very substance of education. Attempts to make educational dialogues more predictable risk stifling their very creativity. The continuation of the CABLE research programme requires firstly further extension of its empirical base, particularly beyond science and mathematics to social science domains where argumentation is an integral part of the disciplines concerned. Secondly, it requires 85

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further development in terms of argumentation theory, which, arguably, has not been elaborated with meaning-making and educational concerns at its centre of gravity. In that sense, CABLE would not only be a “consumer” of argumentation theory but could have the pretension of extending it.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer of this chapter for insightful comments across a broad range of educational topics, as well as very careful proof reading, that have enabled us to improve our argumentation.

Note 1 From the 1990s to the 2010s, CABLE research has been given impetus notably by the publication of the following collected works and monographs: Andriessen & Coirier (1999), Andriessen et al. (2003), Baker et al. (2013), Muller Mirza & Perret-Clermont (2009), Schwarz & Baker (2017).

References Abma, T. A., Greene, J. C., Karlsson, O., Ryan, K., Schwandt, T. A. & Widdershoven, G. A. M. (2001). Dialogue on dialogue. Evaluation, 7(2), 164–180. Allwood, J. (1997). Dialog as collective thinking. In P. Pylkkänen, P. Pylkkö & P. A. Hautamäki (Eds.), Brain, Mind and Physics (pp. 205–211). Amsterdam: IOS Press. Allwood, J., Traum, D. & Jokinen, K. (2000). Cooperation, dialogue and ethics. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 53(6), 871–914. Andriessen, J. & Baker, M. J. (in preparation). On Collaboration. (Monograph). Andriessen, J. & Baker, M. J. (2013).Argument diagrams and learning: Cognitive and educational perspectives. In G. Schraw, M. McCrudden & D. Robinson (Eds.), Learning Through Visual Displays: Current Perspectives on Cognition, Learning, and Instruction (pp. 329–356). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Andriessen, J. & Baker, M. J. (2014). Arguing to learn. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2nd edn, pp. 439–460). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Andriessen, J., Baker, M. J. & Suthers, D. (2003). Arguing to Learn: Confronting Cognitions in ComputerSupported Collaborative Learning Environments. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Andriessen, J. & Coirier, P. (Eds.) (1999). Foundations of Argumentative Text Processing. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Andriessen, J. & Schwarz, B. (2009). Argumentative design. In N. Muller Mirza & A.-N. Perret-Clermont (Eds.), Argumentation and Education: Theoretical Foundations and Practices (pp. 145–174). New York: Springer. Baker, M. J. (1999). Argumentation and constructive interaction. In J. Andriessen & P. Coirier (Eds.), Foundations of Argumentative Text Processing (pp. 179–202). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Baker, M. J. (2002). Argumentative interactions, discursive operations and learning to model in science. In P. Brna, M. Baker, K. Stenning & A. Tiberghien (Eds.), The Role of Communication in Learning to Model (pp. 303–324). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Baker, M. J. (2003). Computer-mediated Argumentative interactions for the co-elaboration of scientific notions. In J. Andriessen, M. J. Baker & D. Suthers (Eds.), Arguing to Learn: Confronting Cognitions in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Environments (pp. 47–78). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Baker, M. J. (2009). Intersubjective and intrasubjective rationalities in pedagogical debates: Realizing what one thinks. In B. Schwarz, T. Dreyfus & R. Hershkowitz (Eds.), Transformation of Knowledge Through Classroom Interaction (pp. 145–158). London: Routledge. Baker, M. J. (2015). The integration of pragma-dialectics and collaborative learning research: Dialogue, externalisation and collective thinking. In F. van Eemeren & B. Garssen (Eds.), Scrutinizing Argumentation in Practice (pp. 175–199). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Collaborative argumentation-based learning Baker, M. J.Andriessen, J. & Järvelä, S. (Eds.) (2013). Affective Learning Together: Social and Emotional Dimensions of Collaborative Learning. London: Routledge. Baker, M. J., Quignard, M., Lund, K. & Séjourné, A. (2003). Computer-supported collaborative learning in the space of debate. In B. Wasson, S. Ludvigsen & U. Hoppe (Eds.), Designing for Change in Networked Learning Environments: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning 2003 (pp. 11–20). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Bakhtin, M. (1986).The problem of speech genres. In M. Holquist (Ed.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (pp. 60–102). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtine, M. (1929/1977). [Volochinov, V.N.] Le Marxisme et la Philosophie du Langage (Marxism and Philosophy of Language). Paris: Éditions du Minuit. (Ist edition:Voloshinov, Leningrad 1929). Barth, E. M. & Krabbe, E. C. W. (1982). From Axiom to Dialogue: A Philosophical Study of Logics and Argumentation. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Brown, A. L. & Campione, J. C. (1990). Communities of learning and thinking: Or a context by any other name. Contributions to Human Development, 21, 108–126. Cohen, L. J. (1992). An Essay on Belief and Acceptance. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Crowell, A. & Kuhn, D. (2014). Developing dialogic argumentation skills: A 3-year intervention study. Journal of Cognition and Development, 15(2), 363–381. De Vries, E., Lund, K. & Baker, M. J. (2002). Computer-mediated epistemic dialogue: Explanation and argumentation as vehicles for understanding scientific notions. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 11(1), 63–103. Dillenbourg, P., Baker, M. J., Blaye, A. & O’Malley, C. (1996). The evolution of research on collaborative learning. In P. Reimann & H. Spada (Eds.), Learning in Humans and Machines: Towards an Interdisciplinary Learning Science (pp. 189–211). Oxford: Pergamon. Doise, W., Mugny, G. & Perret-Clermont, A.-N. (1975). Social interaction and the development of logical operations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 6, 367–383. Edwards, D. & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive Psychology. London: Sage. Greeno, J. G. & Engeström,Y. (2014). Learning in activity. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2nd edn, pp. 128–147). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harman, G. (1986). Change in View: Principles of Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Isohätälä, J. Näykki, P. Järvelä, S. & Baker, M. J. (2018). Striking a balance: Socio-emotional processes during argumentation in collaborative learning interaction. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 16, 1–19. Koschmann, T. (Ed.) (1996). CSCL: Theory and Practice of an Emerging Paradigm. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Krabbe, E. C. W. & Walton, D. N. (2011). Formal dialectical systems and their uses in the study of argumentation. In E. Feteris, B. Garssen & A. F. Snoeck Henkemans (Eds.), Keeping in Touch with PragmaDialectics: In Honor of Frans H. van Eemeren (pp. 245–263). Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishers. Kuhn, D. & Crowell, A. (2011). Dialogic argumentation as a vehicle for developing young adolescents’ thinking. Psychological Science, 22, 545–552. Kuhn, D., Goh, W., Iordanou, K. & Shaenfield, D. (2008). Arguing on the computer: A microgenetic study of developing argument skills in a computer-supported environment. Child Development, 79(5), 1310–1328. Lemke, J. L. (2000). Across the scales of time: Artefacts, activities and meaning in ecosocial systems. Mind, Culture and Activity, 7(4), 273–290. Matusov, E. & Wegerif, R. (2014). Dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: Has Rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 2. doi:10.5195/dpj.2014.78 Mercer, N. (1996). The quality of talk in children’s collaborative activity in the classroom. Learning and Instruction, 6(4), 359–377. Mercer, N., Wegerif, R. & Dawes, L. (1999). Children’s talk and the development of reasoning in the classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 25(1), 95–111. Mevarech, Z. R. & Light, P. (1992). Peer-based interaction at the computer: Looking backward, looking forward. Learning and Instruction, 2(3), 275–280. Muller Mirza, N. & Perret-Clermont, A.-N. (2009). Argumentation and Education:Theoretical Foundations and Practices. New York: Springer. Muntig, P. & Turnbull, W. (1998). Conversational structure and facework in arguing. Journal of Pragmatics, 29, 225–256.

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Baker, Andriessen and Schwarz Perelman, C. & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1958). Traité de l’argumentation. La nouvelle rhétorique. Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles. Ploetzner, R., Dillenbourg, P., Praier, M. & Traum, D. (1999). Learning by explaining to oneself and to others. In P. Dillenbourg (Ed.), Collaborative-Learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches (pp. 103–121). Oxford: Elsevier. Reeve, J. (2009). Why teachers adopt a controlling motivating style toward students and how they can become more autonomy supportive. Educational Psychologist, 44(3), 159–175. Resnick, L. B., Asterhan, C. S. & Clarke, S. N. (2017). Accountable Talk: Instructional Dialogue that Builds the Mind. Geneva: The International Academy of Education (IAE) and the International Bureau of Education (IBE) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Downloaded from the Internet on 18 September 2018: www.ibe.unesco.org/sites/default/files/ resources/educational_practices_29-v7_002.pdf Rigotti, E. & Greco Morasso, S. (2009). Argumentation as an object of interest and as a social and cultural resource. In N. Muller Mirza & A.-N. Perret-Clermont (Eds.), Argumentation and Education: Theoretical Foundations and Practices (pp. 9–66). New York: Springer. Scardamalia, M. & Bereiter, C. (2003). Knowledge building. In J. W. Guthrie (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Education (2nd edn, pp. 1370–1373). New York: MacMillan Reference. Schwarz, B. B. (2018). Computer-supported argumentation and learning. In F. Fischer, C. E. HmeloSilver, S. R. Goldman & P. Reimann (Eds.), International Handbook of the Learning Sciences (pp. 318–329). London: Routledge. Schwarz, B. B. & Asterhan, C. S. C. (2011). E-moderation of synchronous discussions in educational settings: A nascent practice. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 20(3), 395–442. Schwarz, B. B. & Baker, M. J. (2017). Dialogue, Argumentation and Education: History,Theory and Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Schwarz, B. B. & Goldberg, T. (2013). “Look who’s talking”: Identity and emotions as resources to historical peer reasoning. In M. J. Baker, J. E. B. Andriessen & S. Järvelä (Eds), Affective Learning Together (pp. 272–291). London: Routledge. Schwarz, B. B., Hershkowitz, R. & Prusak, N. (2010). Argumentation and mathematics. In C. Howe & K. Littleton (Eds.), Educational Dialogues: Understanding and Promoting Productive Interaction (pp. 115–141). London: Routledge. Schwarz, B. B. & Shahar, N. (2017). Combining the dialogic and the dialectic: Putting argumentation into practice for classroom talk. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 12, 113–132. Sitri, F. (2003). L’objet du débat: La construction des objets de discours dans des situations argumentatives orales (The Object of Debate: The Construction of Discursive Objects in Oral Argumentative Situations). Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle. Suthers, D. (2003). Representational guidance for collaborative learning. In H. U. Hoppe, F.Verdejo & J. Kay (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in Education (pp. 3–10). Amsterdam: IOS Press. Suthers, D. & Hundhausen, C. (2003). An Empirical Study of the Effects of Representational Guidance on Collaborative Learning. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 12(2), 183–219. Toulmin, S. E. (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trognon, A. & Batt, M. (2003). Comment représenter le passage de l’intersubjectif à l’intrasubjectif ? Essai de Logique Interlocutoire (How to represent the transition from the intersubjective to the intrasubjective. An essay in interlocutionary logic). L’Orientation Scolaire et Professionnelle, 32(3), 399–436. Van Eemeren, F. H., & Grootendorst, R. (1984). Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions. Dordrecht-Holland: Foris Publications. van Eemeren, F. H., Grootendorst, R. & Henkemans, F. S. (1996). Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory: A Handbook of Historical Backgrounds and Contemporary Developments. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Walton, D. N. (1992). Plausible Argument in Everyday Conversation. New York: State University of New York Press. Wertsch, J.V. (1991). Voices of the Mind. A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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7 LEARNING, DISCURSIVE FAULTINESS AND DIALOGIC ENGAGEMENT Anna Sfard

The word dialogic is a frequent presence in the current educational literature. Whereas the exact meaning of this term may not be immediately obvious, it clearly functions as a trademark of high-quality instruction. The excitement with dialogue transpires from such claims as “dialogic instruction improves intellectual development” (Koedinger & Stampfer Wiese, 2015, p. 283), “the quantity and quality of dialogue in the classroom seems key to harvesting … multiple benefits” (Topping & Trickey, 2015, p. 109) or “dialogic teaching has the power to break the cycle of low demand/low performance too often experienced by children from disadvantaged socioeconomic background” (Resnick, Asterhan, & Clarke, 2015, p. 3). Neither the fact that some of these assertions may later be deemed as “inadequately tested” (Koedinger & Stampfer Wiese, 2015, p. 283) nor a certain ambiguity of the term “dialogic pedagogy” seems to deter the advocates. One thing about this kind of pedagogy is clear: at its heart lies the idea of learning through conversation.These days, the confidence in the benefits of talk seems unshaken. But while intuitively irresistible, this belief is still to be theoretically grounded and empirically corroborated. The project of substantiating the pedagogy of learning-by-talking with an analytic argument, while considerably advanced by some authors (see, for instance,Wegerif, 2013), is still in its early stages, whereas the quickly accumulating research findings, although promising, have not yet brought decisive evidence (Sfard, 2015). Furthering the project of theorising is my aim in this chapter. A close look at the relation between learning and communicating is taken here through the lens of conceptualisation that can be called “discursive”.1 The discursive approach divides the obviously heterogeneous category of learning into subtypes differing, among others, in the nature and extent of their dependence on linguistic interactions. This nuanced vision of learning–talking relation allows to qualify our as-for-now rather indiscriminate belief in the power of conversation. Within the discursive framework, it is possible to find out which kinds of learning can benefit from which kinds of interaction. With these distinctions in place, the problem of inconclusive findings may be eased, and some apparent inner contradictions of the idea of learning in conversations that involve “multiple voices” may also be dissolved. The chapter begins with the introduction of the discursive framework and follows with distinguishing two subtypes of learning, object-level and meta-level. A close look is then taken at

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the more powerful, but also more demanding, of these two categories, and the adjective dialogic is introduced to denote the kind of interaction that seems indispensable if such learning is to occur. The chapter ends with a reflection on challenges to dialogic engagement we all face in our current fast-paced reality.

Discursive conceptualisation of learning The conceptualisation to be offered in this chapter pertains to the type of learning that occupies centre stage in schools and universities. This learning is often described as getting acquainted with “subjects” such as science, mathematics, history, sociology or theory of art. Inspired by the contemporary philosophy of knowledge (Wittgenstein, 1953; Foucault, 1972; Rorty, 1979) on the one hand, and by sociocultural approaches to learning (Vygotsky, 1978, 1987; Lave, 1988; Rogoff, 1990) on the other, I see it useful to consider these subjects as special forms of communication, or discourses. Each such discourse has been constructed along history as a toolbox for constructing potentially useful accounts of different segments of reality. School-type learning may now be called discursive, with this name always reminding of its being geared at shaping communication, as opposed to more practical forms of activity, such as biking or cooking. Discourses can be distinguished from one another by a number of interrelated characteristics: their special keywords (for instance, “three”, “triangle”, “set” or “function” in mathematics); their unique visual mediators (e.g. numerals, algebraic symbols and graphs); their distinctive routines, that is, patterned ways in which its characteristic tasks (e.g. defining or proving) are being performed; and their generally endorsed narratives (in mathematics, theorems, definitions and computational rules, among others). The descriptor “generally endorsed” is to be understood as referring to endorsement by the community of the discourse, with this latter term signifying all those who are recognised as able to participate in that discourse. Within this conceptualisation, thinking mathematically (scientifically, sociologically) means participating in the historically developed discourse known as mathematical (scientific, sociological). More generally, thinking is now to be understood as multimodal self-communication, and discourses become our “thinking caps” that we can use intermittently, according to circumstances. In tune with this conceptualisation, learning of mathematics (science, sociology) becomes the process of individualising mathematical (scientific, sociological) discourse, whereas individualising is the process of becoming able to employ the discourse agentively, according to one’s own needs.

Types of discursive learning Discourse development, whether ontogenetic, fostered in schools or historical, happening, in scientific laboratories, among others, involves changes at two levels. Object-level learning is that which brings change in what is being told and endorsed, whereas meta-level learning transforms how this is done. More specifically, object-level learning expresses itself in a simple growth of the collection of stories endorsed as potentially useful (or as “true”) by the community of the given discourse. This is the case, for instance, when the student already acquainted with the basics of Euclidean geometry explores quadrilaterals, constructs claims about their properties and eventually proves them; or when one is asked to experiment with the free fall of different objects and formulate hypotheses about its regularities. In contrast, meta-level learning takes place when the student, to be able to tell any new story, must first get acquainted with a reformed storytelling apparatus and in particular, must individualise new routines for forging narratives and examining their endorsability. This kind of learning is necessary when the student accustomed to Newtonian discourse is required to speak about reality in Einsteinian terms. 90

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In a more traditional language, the need for meta-level learning occurs whenever a transition is to be made to a discourse incommensurable with the one in which the learner is already conversant. Since the new discourse rests on different ontological and epistemological foundations, meta-level learning is not a matter of simple accretion; rather, it requires revision of the entire body of previously endorsed narratives. In the face of incommensurability, the Aristotelian law of non-contradiction loses its force: a story considered as true in one of the incommensurable discourses may appear as clashing with a narrative endorsed in the other, and yet it would be futile to ask which version should be retained and which rejected. Indeed, criteria for endorsability, along with the law of non-contradiction, function within discourses and do not hold between them. Once the meta-level shift occurs, some of the previously endorsed narratives are considered as “misconceptions”. Thus, instead of being incompatible and mutually exclusive, such discourses complement each other in their applicability. The phenomenon of incommensurability may be much more central to our lives than we realise. Whenever incommensurability is mentioned, we tend to think about the big historical changes that Thomas Kuhn (1962) famously termed “scientific revolutions”: the transition from Aristotelian to Newtonian narratives on the physical world around us and the similar one from the latter discourse to the one proposed by Einstein; the gulf between Ptolemaian and Copernican discourses on heavenly bodies; the phlogiston talk about combustion versus the one of oxidation. It is with these examples that incommensurability has first been brought to our collective awareness.2 And yet, there are other instances of incommensurability, and we may be unwittingly stumbling over them wherever we go. In school mathematics, invisible discursive divides lie in wait all along the curriculum. They are there, for instance, when the child is to make a transition from everyday talk on triangles and squares to that of Euclidean geometry or whenever the existing numerical discourse – say that of natural numbers – is expected to accommodate a new kind of numbers, such as those signified with fractions or those to be called negative (Sfard, 2007). Incommensurability is also present whenever one faces a culture, ethnicity, religion or ideology different from one’s own. In today’s world of unprecedented mobility, where the global homogenisation goes hand in hand with the ever growing local diversity, encounters with this latter kind of incommensurability became a regular part of daily lives. The conceptualisation of learning proposed in this chapter furnished another good illustration of the phenomenon of incommensurability. Because of its tenet on the ontological unity of thinking and communication, the discursive approach is incommensurable with more traditional, Cartesian visions of learning, which are inherently dualist. This dualism is clearly visible in statements such as those with the help of which most advocates of learning-through-talking support their stance. For instance, the typical claim “Language … is a very powerful tool and should be used to foster the learning of mathematics” (NCTM, 2000, p. 128) presents communication (language) and learning mathematics as two activities rather than one, with the former just auxiliary to the latter. When mathematics (or knowledge, more generally) is replaced with discourse, this latter portrayal gives way to the vision of communication as the object of learning. If the fact that we are living on discursive faultlines escapes us, it is because of our tendency to mistake signs of incommensurability for controversies about facts. While using the same words as our interlocutors, we tend to ascribe occasional disagreements to the other persons’ errors in applying the shared rules of storytelling. The possibility that these persons follow an all different set of rules is not considered. Kuhn has aptly highlighted this phenomenon while telling the story of his own long struggles with Aristotle’s Physica, the event that was eventually rewarded with his insight about incommensurability (Kuhn, 1977). In spite of all his efforts, Kuhn tells us, he failed to figure out Aristotle’s answers to the questions he has been asking 91

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himself while reading. To him, Aristotle’s writings made no sense. Even more vexing was the obvious meta-question: “How could [Aristotle’s] characteristic talents have failed him so when applied to motion? … And, above all, why had his views been taken so seriously for so long a time by so many of his successors?” Only after long deliberations was Kuhn, the Newtonian physicist, able to tell himself that the responsibility for his bewilderment rested with the fact that although using the same words as Aristotle, he tried to unpack the ancient stories in discourse different from the one in which they had been originally told. That any discursive learning can benefit from conversing with others is inscribed in its definition. Yet, the exact nature of the contribution the conversation can make varies depending on the level of learning.The mainly accretive object-level learning requires not much more than proper use of familiar discursive rules and can thus, in principle, be generated by the learner conversing mainly with herself. In contrast, in meta-level learning, occasioned by the learners’ encounter with a discourse incommensurable with their own, conversation is indispensable. Interaction with others is needed to even make the newcomers aware of the existence of this as-yet unfamiliar mode of communication. Yet, the cross-discursive conversation that must then take place is obstructed by incommensurability and is further hindered by its inherent invisibility. The next section is devoted to the question of how to cope with this difficulty.

Dialogic engagement for the sake of meta-level learning Given the invisibility of the discursive gap to be traversed in meta-learning, making it safely to the other side may require special discursive collaboration between the aspiring gulf traverser and those living already on the other shore. Indeed, this time, collaboration is not optional but indispensable. But how to collaborate with those who communicate in ways different from one’s own? A special kind of interaction may be necessary to help the learner to deal with incommensurability. Even before engaging with the question of what properties such communication should have, I will call it dialogic. This name seems to fit because of the way in which the idea of dialogue was used by many 20th century thinkers whose work seems relevant to the present question. Buber, Gadamer, Lévinas, Bakhtin and Freire, to name but a few most prominent ones, may have never used the word “incommensurability” or even “discourse”, but they can be seen as preoccupied with the phenomena signified by these words. Though quite different from one another and occasionally critical of each other’s work, they were likeminded with regard to the ubiquity of otherness and its challenges, which they deemed as an inextricable part of human condition. All of them were also disquieted by the inherent fragility of human connections. Finally, they shared the vision of dialogue as the process of communicating against all odds. “Communicating” is used here in both its literal sense and as a metaphor for human relations. For these philosophers, the defining traits of dialogue were, first, the presence of more than one discourse, thus the constant possibility of incommensurability; and second, its being geared toward easing the predicament of the discursive divide and not necessarily by its removal. The request for multivocality was forcefully promoted by Mikhail Bakhtin, the literary theorist who criticised mono-discursive (or monologic) communication as one in which the speaker attempts to sound as God’s ventriloquist or as a proxy of natural forces (Bakhtin, 1986). Bakhtin’s monologic–dialogic distinction seems to parallel Martin Buber’s famous opposition between I–it and I–thou relations (Buber, 1923/1958). I–it connection comes to the fore whenever our conversational partners, be they other humans or inanimate objects, are taken as existing and being what they are independently of our presence. I–thou relation is one in which our presence does matter to the other and the other’s present matters to us. Entering a dialogic encounter means opening oneself to this unknown Other, celebrating alterity and treating the Other as an 92

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indecomposable whole that, in the process of constant transformation, can transform us as well. Grounded in a similar recognition and comparable respect for alterity inheres in Emmanuel Lévinas’ notion of face-to-face encounters, in which the interlocutor’s face calls us into “giving and serving” the other human being (Lévinas, 1985, p. 119). The second characteristic of dialogue, related to the question of how to deal with the difference, was stressed by Hans-Georg Gadamer when he stated that the “genuine dialogue” is “a process of two people understanding each other” (Gadamer, 1975, p. 347; quoted in Bernstein, 1986, p. 112; emphasis added). In such dialogue, “each opens himself to the other person, truly accepts his point of view as worthy of consideration and gets inside the other to such extent that he understands not a particular individual but what he says” (ibid.). For Bakhtin, similarly, dialogicality is not just a matter of multiple voices but also of a genuine engagement, the ultimate expression of which is that one voice allows itself to be shaped by another. This motive is also inherent in Buber’s idea of the I–thou relation that requires opening oneself to alterity and is inscribed in Lévinas’ image of the dialogue as an ultimate expression of respect to and responsibility for the Other. It is this kind of communicational engagement that will be called here “dialogic”. Before proceeding toward a more precise, operational definition, a distinction must be made between two types of discourse, each of which may require its own version of dialogue. Indeed, when we look for accounts likely to be useful in dealing with the physical world around us, we tend to engage in this communicational effort somewhat differently than we do while seeking guidance with regard to our social conduct. Those accounts that picture the world as existing whether we are here or not seek to answer the question of what there is and how it works. As such, they can be called ontic. Ontic discourses are those in which most scientific stories are told. The other type of narratives, those that are situated in the social context and may help in answering the question of what is the right thing to do, can be named deontic. Ethics, religions and diverse ideologies are among typical examples of deontic discourses. These were deontic discourses that drew the primary attention of Lévinas and Buber, both of whom have been described as “philosophers of interpersonal encounters” (Wigmore, 2010). In most school curricula, on the other hand, ontic discourses are those that occupy centre stage. Social scientists, being a part of the social world that constitutes the object of their study, cannot do justice to the questions they ask unless they employ discourses that straddle both these categories. In this hybrid communication, the researchers must alternate between being insiders and outsiders to the social relations under study, entering respectively either deontic or ontic mode. Two additional differences between ontic and deontic discourses appear in the summarising Table 7.1. First, ontic discourses are characterised by the strict subject–object dichotomy (and are thus reminiscent of the Buber’s I–it relation), whereas in deontic accounts, the distinction between the storyteller and the object of the story gets blurred (as in I–thou, where what is in front of me is seen as not unlike me). Second, although logical coherence between all endorsed narratives is required in all types of communication, only in ontic discourses no narrative, not even the primary tenet, is to be adopted without undergoing a certain substantiation procedure. Such a procedure must be grounded in the use of publicly accessible criteria. In science, persuading the addressee to endorse a story is usually done by producing empirical evidence, and in mathematics it is achieved through deductive derivation known as “proving” (in the case of the primary tenets called axioms, a proof of their mutual consistency is required). When it comes to the endorsement of foundational tenets of deontic discourses, no special procedures are needed. The basic deontic distinctions, such as those between right and wrong or between good and evil are primary, in that they do not require a rationale (admittedly, people often do try to rationalise their basic deontic choices, but in most cases, the “rationales” they produce prove resistant to 93

Anna Sfard Table 7.1 Properties of ontic and deontic discourses Aspect of discourse

Ontic discourse

Object of stories The question the stories answer

Physical world Social world What there is and how it works What is right (good) and how to judge it Interactions with physical world Interactions with other people, social conduct Sharp, unmistakable (I–it) Blurred (I–thou) Undergo replicable Are received from authoritative endorsement procedure others Natural sciences, mathematics, Ethics, religion, ideology, social social sciences sciences

Meant to mediate Subject–object distinction/relation How primary tenets are adopted Examples

Deontic discourse

rational argumentation). The direct adoption is an act of joining a community and has more to do with people’s identity work than with their reasoned choices. The term dialogic engagement may now be defined by recasting Gadamer’s description of “genuine dialogue” into terms taken from the discursive framework and by explaining the distinctive way in which this term should be interpreted in ontic and deontic discourses. The first defining condition of dialogic engagement echoes Gadamer’s call for “opening oneself ” to the other person and for “truly accepting [the other’s] point of view as worthy of consideration”. Within the present context, this is to say that the dialogically engaged participant is always alert to the possibility of incommensurability between her own and her interlocutor’s discourses and asks about its existence whenever a conversation stumbles over disagreements. Since we are naturally inclined to take commensurability as a default option – suspecting otherwise may jeopardise the communicational flow – acting on this principle of constant alertness requires much determination.The other defining feature of dialogic engagement corresponds to Gadamer’s request to “get inside the other”. In our discursive rendering, this means that in the case of suspected incommensurability, the dialogically engaged participant does her best to figure out the “inner logic” of the interlocutor’s discourse, looking for possible disparities in word use, in invisible basic tenets and in routines, among others. The third part of Gadamer’s advice is to try to “understand not a particular individual but what he says”. Here, “understanding an individual” is opposed to “understanding his words” and as such may be interpreted as referring to identification with the other person – to adopting her discourse as if it was one’s own or, to put it in Bakhtin’s words, as if it was for her “internally persuasive” rather than just “authoritative” (Holquist, 1990; Matusov, 2010). Gadamer’s disclaimer exempts the dialogically engaged interlocutor from this latter obligation. One does not need to seek identification and agreement and can just aim at seeing what others see, while also remaining aware of the mechanisms that generates this image. It is in this third characteristic of dialogic engagement where the ontic and deontic discourse part ways. Fathoming the difference between one’s own and another person’s cultural, religious or ideological commitments can suffice to make sense of the other individual’s conduct. Endowed with these understandings, one may hypothesise about how this other person would act in various situations. With these insights, one may be able to live and let live, and peaceful coexistence may become attainable without imposition or trespassing discursive borders. In this case, dialogic engagement entails acceptance of the fact that the progress in learning is not “from simply wrong to simply right, but … from A to both A and B” (Wegerif, 2013, p. 29). 94

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This forgiving stance toward incommensurability, which is the preferable option in the case of deontic discourses, is difficult to sustain when a collaborative undertaking must be mediated by ontic communication. Discursive differences between participants, even if acknowledged, may frustrate collective efforts. This is probably why science protects itself against discursive plurality and tries to make away with ontic incommensurabilities by granting hegemony to particular discourses.3 The students who wish to add such discourse to their discursive repertoire must follow sway and attempt meta-level learning. This will require much effort, but its worthiness seems quite obvious: the richer one’s “discursive space” – the space of discourses in which the person can participate, either actively or as just an educated eavesdropper – the wider this person’s access to whatever forms of life the society and its culture have to offer and the greater her ability to collaborate with others. To sum, to say that one is dialogically engaged in a conversation, means that this person: (1) actively examines the possibility of incommensurability between her own discourse and that of the other participant; (2) acts as an aspiring participant of the other person’s discourse; (3) strives to fully individualise the partner’s incommensurable discourse whenever this discourse is ontic; in the case of deontic incommensurability the person may satisfy herself with developing the ability to act as if she was a participant of the other discourse, which can be done by a thoughtful emulation of the expert participant’s moves. The ontic version of dialogic engagement is to be cultivated in science and mathematics education, in learning engineering and medicine; the other one is necessary in peace education, learning literature, history and therapies. The three defining conditions can be translated into sets of publicly accessible properties of interactions, and this makes the definition operational and suitable for use in empirical research. It is also noteworthy that similarly to the constructs offered by Bakhtin, Buber and Lévinas, this definition associates dialogicality with such values as openness, honesty, commitment and respect for the Other. Opting for a dialogic engagement may thus seem to be a matter of a moral commitment and of identity concerns not any less than of epistemological preferences. The question to be briefly tackled in the next section is how to foster such engagement when meta-level learning is to occur.

Challenges to dialogic engagement Dialogic engagement is desirable at any time in any classroom, but when it comes to dealing with incommensurability, it becomes truly indispensable. Considering the demanding nature of such engagement – reading other person’s mind requires determination and effort – it is not surprising that disengaged learning–teaching interactions are observed in schools all over the world. Based on his own and his colleagues’ research, Mercer (2002) concluded: “observational research in classrooms suggests that when pupils are allowed to work together in groups most of their talk is either disputational or blandly and unreflectively co-operative” (p. 148). In my own and my colleague’s studies, I have seen many such disengaged peer interactions (Sfard & Kieran, 2001; Chang, & Sfard, 2018). Here are two examples we saw as particularly telling because of their striking similarity to one another. This likeness was all the more surprising considering the fact that the relevant events were far removed from each other in both time and space: they were conducted in 1992 in Canada (Sfard & Kieran, 2001) and in 2015 in Melbourne (Chan & Sfard, 2018), respectively. In both these cases, a pair of 13-year-old 95

Anna Sfard Table 7.2 Two examples of dyadic peer interactions Montreal, 1992 (Sfard & Kieran, 2001)

Melbourne, 2015 (Chan & Sfard, 2018)

[36] Gur: Oh, we do that thing. Ok, just trying to find it. [37] Ari: yeah [38] Gur: Cause I was thinking … cause 5 is 20, [39] Ari: It’s 45.Yeah [40] Gur: (mumble) So it’s 45.

[51] Aya: Oh okay, okay. That makes sense then. [52] Pia: Altogether it’s 125 because like ... [53] Aya:Yah, yeah, yeah. [54] Pia: And … [55] Aya: Now, I get it. I thought that was //just 25. [56] P  ia: //Yeah, yeah. So one dude’s 13. That means the other four is 112.

students was solving a mathematical problem. Both these interactions were asymmetric (Fernández, Wegerif, Mercer, & Rojas-Drummond, 2002): one member of the pair played the leading role, and the other – that of a follower (Gur, Aya, respectively). The excerpts in Table 7.2 begin after the leading participant explained a solution different from the “answer” championed by the other child. In both excerpts, it is quite clear that none of the participant was dialogically engaged.Those who led the conversation (Ari, Pia) were polite but evidently had little interest in the partner’s thinking – see their indifferent “yeah” (Ari: [37], [39]; Pia: [56]), that interrupted or just put an end to their partners’ attempts to explain their own thinking (Gur: [36], [38]; Aya: [55]). The partners also showed disinterest, albeit in a different way: they claimed understanding of the other child’s explanations (Gur: [36], Aya: [51], [55]) while in fact their tone and facial expressions, as seen in the video, as well as in their later moves (not shown here for the lack of space), appeared to contradict this claim. Based on our observations over time, we considered Gur’s and Aya’s quick capitulations as acts of face saving. Such signs of disengagement appeared all along the way in both cases. In both studies, we concluded that the necessary type of engagement is something that must be fostered. In our world of exponentially multiplying distractions and of equally quickly shrinking attention span, true dialogic engagement may be increasingly difficult to find even when it appears indispensable. The force that drives dialogic engagement, it seems, is effectively countered by our “instinct for consensus” that, according to some authors, became overwhelmingly powerful with the advent of social networks and other digital temptations (Jacobs, 2017). As a result, the call for tolerance toward difference is often interpreted as a license for indifference. Paucity of genuine dialogue appears to be not uncommon even in research, where theories multiply and challenges of incommensurability lurk at every corner. One recent example has been provided by Bruno Latour (2018), who complained about a certain “fundamental misunderstanding about Gaia”, the scientific theory of relation between living organisms and their inorganic surroundings, relevant to the issue of climate change. Latour claimed that this misunderstanding, common to “those who rejected [Gaia] too quickly, and those who embraced it too enthusiastically”, resulted from the deniers’ and the affirmers’ unawareness of the need for “general revision of scientific conceptions”. In the language of this chapter, Latour blamed the scientific community for being insufficiently alert to the possibility of incommensurability. In our own field, educational research, the oft-heard call for multivocality is sometimes misinterpreted as a license for cacophony, with everyone allowed to play their own tune without taking proper notice of other voices. Much has been said in research literature about how classroom conversation should be designed to be optimally conducive to learning. Different labels have been given to the kind of 96

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linguistic interactions considered as particularly effective in this respect. Exploratory Talk (Mercer, Hennessy, & Warwick, 2017) and Accountable Talk (Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008; O’Connor & Michaels, 2017) are the names of the probably most precisely described and most systematically researched types, whose power to advance learning has already been empirically corroborated.Yet, none of these or similar proposals has been crafted specifically with the eye to meta-level learning, this most demanding type of individualisation, which is supposed to carry the learner to the other side of incommensurability and thus requires dialogic engagement more than any other. I will not make claims about how the dialogic engagement may be instigated and sustained. In a society that prioritises instant consensus, transforming classrooms into oases of dialogic engagement is a challenging endeavour and requires much further thinking. For now let me only say that such project may require promoting norms of interaction, some of which are likely to be considered as going against currently favoured principles (Sfard, 2007; 2008)

Concluding remarks Within the discursive framework it became clear that different types of interaction, corresponding to different types of expected outcome, may be necessary for different types of learning.The picture has been further refined by the distinction between ontic and deontic discourses. It is the discursive conceptualisation that led to this nuanced vision of the relation between talk and learning, briefly summarised in Table 7.3. Increasing the resolution is an important development, if only because any advice for teaching issued indiscriminately for all types of learning, while helpful in some cases, may prove counterproductive in some others. Thus, for instance, in the case of conflicting narratives coming from incommensurable discourses, a never-ending, futile dispute may result from learners’ attempts to resolve the controversy by applying logical argumentation, the method often promoted as a panacea for disagreement. Another benefit from the discursive conceptualisation is the disappearance of the apparent contradiction between the concurrent calls for multivocality and for agreement – the requests for a simultaneous presence of multiple discourses and for overcoming controversies. Within the present conceptual framework, the two suggestions are to be understood differently in different contexts.Whereas the call for multivocality is in place in the case of deontic conversation, where participants seek mutual understanding but not necessarily agreement, agreement is required in ontic (mathematical, Table 7.3 The relation between different levels of discursive learning and conversation Conversation

Level of learning

Ontic discourse

Optional or necessary? Its feature Necessary for learning Its expected outcome

Object-level Meta-level Object-level Meta-level

Optional (potentially helpful) Necessary Participants’ mastery of the present discourse Dialogic engagement

Object-level

Ideally, all the learners endorse the same new narratives in the shared, already familiar discourse All the learners adopt the same The learners can participate historically-established discourse in the discourses of their (incommensurable with the one conversational partner with which the learning began) without necessarily adopting them

Meta-level

Deontic discourse

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scientific) exchanges, where the presence of multiple voices is advisable as a powerful prompt for learning but not as its final outcome. In this case, it is expected that all the learners end up individualising the same historically developed discourse and jointly endorsing its narratives. In this book devoted to learning-by-conversation, I feel an urge to conclude with an allimportant disclaimer: conversation with other people is not the only setting in which discursive learning can happen, nor is dialogic engagement a characteristic that can only be found in interactions with another person. Indeed, one’s inner struggle to manage a discursive gap can be helped, but not replaced, by conversation with others. Without intensive dialogue with ourselves, order will not emerge from the chaos of multiple discourses, some of them already our own, some others echoing people we know and yet other ones coming from the texts we read. The admittedly extreme case of Kuhn struggling with Aristotle’s writings may always serve as a reminder of this simple truth. If such a reminder appears necessary these days, it is because of our susceptibility to “Midas syndrome”: while considering learning-through-talking-with-others as golden, we may wish the whole world turn into gold. It is thus time to warn ourselves that if this happens, the lack of some vital ingredient – in this case of our self-communication – is likely to thwart our efforts. Indeed, no learning is likely to occur without uninterrupted stretches of inner debate, and no self-communication can be effective without our being dialogically engaged in the process.

Notes 1 In other places, it was named communicational (Sfard & Kieran 2001) or commognitive (Sfard 2008), with this last term being a portmanteau of communicational and cognitive. 2 Kuhn’s claims about incommensurability have been extensively criticised (Douven & De Regt, 2002), but it seems that the main culprit was the ambiguity of Kuhn’s conceptual system and especially of his underdefined term paradigm. In this chapter, paradigm has been replaced by the operational notion of discourse, and this allowed also for the operationalisation of incommensurability. 3 This is done by either removing the other ones or by subsuming versions of old discourses into the one that has been anointed to reign. For instance, the discourse of combustion as oxidation replaced the one of phlogiston and Copernican astronomy dismissed the Ptolemaian; in comparison, the discourse of integers swallowed that of natural numbers, thus subjecting it to its own meta-rules, and Einsteinian mechanics included the Newtonian as its “approximation” in the case of low velocities. It is also worth mentioning that in some regions of natural science several useful incommensurable alternatives may sometimes survive, whereas in social sciences such plurality is a norm.

References Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (V. W. McGee, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bernstein, R. J. (1986). Philosophical Profiles. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buber, M. (1923/1958). I and Thou (2nd edn, R. G. Smith, Trans.). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Chan, E. M. C. & Sfard, A. (2018). Balancing imbalanced collaboration – A cross-cultural phenomenon? Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association, New York. Douven, I., & De Regt, H. W. (2002). A Davidsonian argument against incommensurability. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 16(2), 157–169. Fernández, M., Wegerif, R., Mercer, N., & Rojas-Drummond, S. (2002). Re-conceptualizing “scaffolding” and the zone of proximal development in the context of symmetrical collaborative learning. Journal of Classroom Interaction, 36(2/1), 40–54. Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge; And, The Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon Books. Gadamer, H.-G. (1975). Truth and Method. New York: The Seabury Press. Holquist, M. (1990). Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge. Jacobs, A. (2017). How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds. New York: Currency.

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Dialogic engagement Koedinger, K. R., & Stamper Wiese, E. (2015). Accounting for socializing inteligence with the knowledgelearning-instruction framework. In L. Resnick, C. Asterhan & S. N. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 275–288). Washington, DC: AERA. Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd edn). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kuhn, T. S. (1977). The Essential Tension. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Latour, B. (2018). Bruno Latour Tracks Down Gaia. Los Angeles Review of Books (July, 3). Lévinas, E. (1985). Ethics and Infinity. Pittsburg, CA: Duquesne Univeristy Press. Matusov, E. (2010). Bakhtin’s notion of the internally persuasive discourse in education: Internal to what? (A case of discussion of issues of foul language in teacher education). Paper presented at the The Second International Interdisciplinary Conference on perspectives and limits of dialogism in Mikhail Bakhtin, tockholm: Stockholm University. www.nordiska.su.se/content/1/c6/06/01/49/publication_2010_ bakhtin_conf_sthlm_2009.pdf Mercer, N. (2002). Developing dialogues. In G. Wells & G. Claxton (Eds.), Learning for Life in the C21st: Sociocultural Perspectives on the Future of Education (pp. 141–153). Oxford: Blackwell. Mercer, N., Hennessy, S., & Warwick, P. (2017). Dialogue, thinking together and digital technology in the classroom: Some educational implications of a continuing line of inquiry. International Journal of Educational Research. doi:10.1016/j.ijer.2017.08.007. Accessed on 20 July 2018. Michaels, S., O’Connor, C., & Resnick, L. B. (2008). Deliberative discourse idealized and realized: Accountable talk in the classroom and in civic life. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27, 283–297. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. (2000). Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. Reston, VA: Author. O’Connor, C., & Michaels, S. (2017). Supporting teachers in taking up productive talk moves: The long road to professional learning at scale. International Journal of Educational Research. doi:10.1016/j. ijer.2017.11.003. Accessed on 27 June 2018. Resnick, L., Asterhan, C., & Clarke, S. N. (2015). Introduction: Talk, learnig, and teaching. In L. Resnick, C. Asterhan & S. N. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 1–12). Washington, DC: AERA. Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sfard, A. (2007). When the rules of discourse change, but nobody tells you: Making sense of mathematics learning from a commognitive standpoint. Journal for Learning Sciences, 16(4), 567–615. Sfard, A. (2008). Thinking as Communicating: Human Development, the Growth of Discourses, and Mathematizing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sfard, A. (2015). Why all this talk about talking classroom? Theorizing the relation between learning and talking. In L. Resnick, C. Asterhan & S. N. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 235–243). Washington, DC: AERA. Sfard, A., & Kieran, C. (2001). Cognition as communication: Rethinking learning-by-talking through multi-faceted analysis of students’ mathematical interactions. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 8(1), 42–76. Topping, K. J., & Trickey, S. (2015). The roel of dialogue in philosophy for children. In L. Resnick, C. Asterhan & S. N. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 99–110). Washington, DC: AERA. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In R. W. Rieber & A. C. Carton (Eds.), The Collected Works of L. S.Vygotsky (pp. 39–285). New York: Plenum Press. Wegerif, R. (2013). Dialogic: Education for the Internet Age. Milton Park: Routledge. Wigmore, S. (2010).Why did Levinas consider Buber’s philosophy insufficient as a theory of Inter-personal Encounter? Retrieved from www.academia.edu/3299338/. Accessed on 27 August 2018. Wittgenstein, L. (1953/2003). Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with a Revised English Translation (3rd edn, G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

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8 DIALOGIC EDUCATIONAL APPROACHES IN IBEROAMERICAN COUNTRIES A systematic mapping review Juan Manuel Fernández-Cárdenas and Sergio Reyes-Angona

Introduction The objective of this chapter is to identify the main thematic trends in the area of dialogic education in Ibero-American countries: Spain and Portugal, as well as the countries that speak Spanish or Portuguese (de jure or de facto) in the Americas. First, we are interested in the methodological approaches that guide research studies in this field. Second, we describe the nature of educational dialogue concerning two questions: Who is involved in dialogue? And how do they talk to each other? Third, we are interested in identifying the communicative processes involved in the learning trajectories and the processes of identity formation of participants. Finally, in the analysis we aim to recognize ideological positions that support the implementation of dialogic educational models, their usefulness and possible forms of resistance. Paulo Freire is one of the most influential thinkers in the historical development of dialogic perspectives in education in Ibero-America (Freire, 1973, 2005, 2008). Freire has challenged traditional approaches to education, promoting a critical view of education and constructing a philosophy of liberation, using as a starting point the identification of the circumstances of the oppressed and the importance of establishing a direct contact with others to produce an authentic transformation of society. Freire’s agenda is based on the dialogicality of education, that is, on the symmetrical relationship with others: “to be dialogical is not to invade, it is not to manipulate, it is not to impose slogans. To be dialogical is to commit oneself to the constant transformation of reality” (Freire, 2005, p. 46). Thus, in true dialogue it is not acceptable for a person to impose on the other his vision of the world. Instead of alienating the other, it is necessary that participants recognize each other as equals, allowing the liberation of all through the symmetry of roles and power. Freire (2005) states that “the conquest implicit in dialogue is the world by dialogic subjects, not the conquest of one another” (p. 89). In this way, there can only be authentic dialogue between people who are able to think critically about the reality they live in and reflect on what is happening in order to be able to transform it. On the other hand, the influence of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and colleagues has been gaining influence in Ibero-America since the decades of the 1980s and 1990s (Bajtín, 1982, 1986, 2000; Bubnova, 1980, 2006, 2008;Voloshinov, 1992). Bakhtin first introduced the concept 100

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of dialogue in his book Speech Genres and other Late Essays (Bakhtin, 1986; published in Spanish as Estética de la creación verbal, Bajtín, 1982), arguing that the power of language resides in its dialogic nature. The subject is constructed through interaction with others; the “I” exists only insofar as it is related to a “you” (Bajtín, 1982, p. 102). Thus, a speaker and an active interlocutor are needed to generate dialogues without merging into each other; thus, the opinions of the listener are recognized, and the position of the hearer may be preserved favouring an active understanding. Bakhtin’s approach revolves around language as a social phenomenon where individuals seek to communicate constantly in dialogue. For this reason, dialogue is considered as the basis for shaping human conscience and is the result of an interdependence of lives that are permeated by a group of interactions. In the words of Bakhtin (Bajtín, 1982): Living means participating in a dialogue, and this in turn means questioning, hearing, responding, agreeing, etc. A man participates in this dialogue all and with all his life: with eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with the whole body, with all his actions. Man gives himself over to the word, and this word is part of the dialogic web of human life, of the universal symposium. (p. 334) The ideas of Freire and Bakhtin have also been blended with other methods and concepts in the research agenda of some disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics and literature, which have produced an extensive number of interpretations about their work, enriching what can now be conceived as a dialogical theory in education in the region, addressed in this chapter, and in the West in general. The objective of this text is to present a systematic mapping review of dialogic education in Ibero-American countries, in order to identify the thematic trends of this educational perspective through the analysis of the academic publications with the greatest impact in this field in the last five years (2013–2018).

The field of sociocultural studies and dialogism in education The line of sociocultural studies in education emerges historically since the resurgence in the West of the work of Vygotsky and colleagues published since the 1970s.Vygotsky died in 1934 and, due to Stalin’s prohibition on publishing his work, was only rediscovered in European and American countries 40 years later, inspiring the reformulation of his seminal ideas in new research projects and theoretical and methodological proposals from the 1980s and 1990s (Bruner, 1986, 1990; Chaiklin & Lave, 1993; Cole, 1996; Daniels, 2001; Edwards & Mercer, 1987; Engeström, 1990; Engeström, Miettinen, & Punamaki, 1999; Lave, 1996; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Lee & Smagorinsky, 2000; Mercer, 1995, 2000; Moll, 1990; Resnick, Säljö, Pontecorvo, & Burge, 1997; Rogoff, 1990, 1994; Rogoff, Matusov, & White, 1996; Wells, 1994; Wertsch, 1985b, 1985a, 1991, 1998; Wertsch, del Río, & Álvarez, 1995). Since the beginning of the 21st century, the field of sociocultural studies has also incorporated studies on dialogism from the Russian school (Fernández-Cárdenas, 2018, 2014; Green et al., 2015; Hetherington & Wegerif, 2018; Matusov, 2015; Montgomery & Fernández-Cárdenas, 2018; Tuomi, 2006; Wegerif, 2012; Wells, 1999, 2002; Wells & Claxton, 2002). In addition, dialogic studies in education have made visible the processes of identity- and knowledge-­construction from a critical perspective (Bazalgette & Buckingham, 2013; Gutiérrez, 2008; Matusov, 2017; Orellana, 2015). For all of these recent developments, the theory developed by Bakhtin and colleagues has been useful in presenting alternatives where the self is constructed in a relational 101

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manner with a concrete other and not only as a dialectic process of engagement with a sociocultural activity. In recent years, systematic efforts have been carried out to identify the current state of the art of sociocultural studies (Rogoff, Callanan, Guttiérez, & Erickson, 2016) and dialogism (Major, Warwick, Rasmussen, Ludvigsen, & Cook, 2018) in education, analysing academic papers published in international indexed databases. These efforts have exhaustively identified the most relevant knowledge production in these fields, mainly in North America and Europe. In Ibero-America, by contrast, this work has not yet been developed, despite being a region that is particularly influential in this field of knowledge, given the geographic origin of authors such as Paulo Freire and others who have, from contemporary perspectives, interpreted concepts such as emancipation in the construction of knowledge, as well as the relevance of a horizontal positioning with others. This chapter takes advantage of the most innovative technology, with tools such as Zotero, Parsif.al and Tableau, to systematize the search results from two international academic databases. The objective is to use the affordances of these technologies to produce a robust, inclusive and up-to-date research report of the academic trends of the field of dialogic education. Next, the methodology and results of this research are presented.

Method This section describes the activities undertaken to develop this systematic mapping review (Garcia-Peñalvo, 2017). The steps were the following: a. Definition of the corpus of analysis: A search was made in Web of Science and Scopus, the two most prestigious and influential academic databases recognized worldwide. In both databases we applied the following Boolean search formula: educ* and (dialog* or conversa* or reflexiv* or critic*) AND LANGUAGE: (English OR Spanish) Refined by: COUNTRIES/REGIONS: (Mexico OR Chile OR Colombia OR Bolivia OR Spain OR Argentina OR Peru OR Brazil OR Costa Rica OR Uruguay OR Ecuador OR Portugal OR Venezuela OR Cuba OR Guatemala OR El Salvador OR Honduras OR Nicaragua OR Panama OR Paraguay OR Dominican Republic OR Puerto Rico) AND CATEGORIES: (Education Educational Research OR Education Scientific Disciplines OR Social Sciences Interdisciplinary OR Anthropology OR Psychology Developmental OR Cultural Studies OR Communication OR Linguistics OR Language Linguistics OR Ethics OR Psychology Multidisciplinary OR Computer Science Interdisciplinary Applications OR Social Issues OR Education Special OR Engineering Multidisciplinary OR Humanities Multidisciplinary OR Psychology OR Art OR Psychology Applied OR Sociology OR Social Work OR Psychology Educational OR Computer Science Artificial Intelligence OR Philosophy OR History OR History Of Social Sciences OR Psychology Experimental) AND DOCUMENT TYPES: (Article OR Book Chapter). This formula explores the relationship of educational studies (educ*) with studies on dialogism (dialog*) and in particular with some dialogic features, such as involvement in a conversation (convers*) or the development of a critical perspective (critic*) towards the position of a person in relation to the other and his circumstances. The formula also establishes filters to select only the production located in Ibero-American countries, as well as only the related subject areas related to education (education, psychology, philosophy and other disciplines of social sciences and humanities). 102

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b. The results were compiled through the use of Zotero and a spreadsheet. c. For Zotero, we created a working group with a shared library in which co-authors of this chapter collaborated. In this library there were initially 2,236 sources registered. Similarly, the spreadsheet with these results was shared in Google Spreadsheets to collaboratively categorize the sources included in this corpus. d. Process of mapping. i.  Filtering of the results: From the 2,236 sources obtained in Web of Science and/or Scopus, the first 500 publications with most citations were selected from each database in order to filter the most influential academic production of this field of knowledge from January 2013 to April 2018. This strategy was aimed to capture the most recent trends in this rapidly evolving field, using citation numbers as a guiding criterion to rank publications. As a strategy to further refine the documentary sample, the inclusion and exclusion criteria used were: Inclusion: articles and original book chapters with conceptual or empirical content, published in journals indexed in Web of Science and/or in Scopus, in English or Spanish. Exclusion: articles or book chapters which present other Systematic Mappings or Systematic Literature Reviews, as well as books, reviews, technical reports and conference proceedings.We also excluded sources that were not linked to the analysis of educational experiences in formal or non-formal settings or sources which were not addressing the analysis of public educational policies at the local, national, regional or global level.That is, articles that did not imply an educational context of any kind were excluded. ii.   Descriptive analysis of the sources: The research questions that organized the descriptive analysis or mapping of the corpus were agreed as shown in Table 8.1. e. Systematic Literature Review procedure: Once the systematic mapping of this field of knowledge was established, we proceeded with a deeper collaborative analysis of these data around four types of markers: a) methodologies used in these investigations; b) forms of dialogue characteristic of these educational experiences; c) problems in the learning trajectory of participants and d) positionings and ideologies that inspire that educational agenda. We conducted processes of inter-reliability of themes by comparing individual processes of categorization of all publications included in this review and solved differences by asking colleagues in the same research group in which we collaborate to provide a third perspective in these cases. These comparative processes took place in four iterations, addressing RQ1,

Table 8.1 Research questions of the systematic mapping review Question RQ1: How many studies were identified in the Scopus and/or Web of Science databases from 2013 to 2018? RQ2: What is the geographical distribution of authors? RQ3: In what contexts are the studies carried out? RQ4: What are the main issues addressed in this research line? RQ5: What are the thematic areas of the most cited articles? RQ6: What findings does the Systematic Literature Review show?

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RQ3, RQ4, RQ5, until a consensus was achieved. Finally, it is worth mentioning that several books and chapters developing systematic mappings and literature reviews have been conducted by the authors of this chapter and research group colleagues (see for instance Ramírez Montoya & Valenzuela González, 2017, in press; Fernández-Cárdenas, ReynagaPeña, González Nieto, & Reyes Angona, in press), so that there is a previous accumulated experience and rigour in the methodology reported here.

Results As for RQ1, the search on ISI Web of Science delivered 361 articles and Scopus 479 articles, filtered through disciplinary categories in the field of educational research; 160 articles were shared by both databases, making a total of 680 sources in this corpus. After applying the exclusion criteria, 85 sources remained, of which 27 were only found in Scopus, 28 only in Web of Science and 30 in both databases.1 The sources are, overwhelmingly, of an empirical nature, that is, they present research results from fieldwork. Specifically, 59 of the 85 articles reviewed are empirical, which represents 69.41%, in contrast to the 16 items identified as theoretical or conceptual (18.82%) and 10 publications which reported different educational experiences (11.76%). The average number of academic citations for each article was just above 10 (10.04). As for RQ2, the geographical distribution of sources included nine countries. It is worth noticing the amount of knowledge production in Spain, with 50 sources, and Mexico as the second most represented country with 13 sources. Chile and Colombia are located in third and fourth place, with seven and five publications respectively. Portugal and Brazil are the only two Portuguese-speaking countries with publications, with four and two publications respectively, ranking in the fifth and sixth positions. It is interesting to see the modest contribution of Argentina, with only two sources, as well as from Peru and Venezuela, with only one publication in each country. Thus, in the Ibero-American context, Spain and Mexico are the protagonists with the most published sources; nevertheless, Spain almost quadruples the Mexican production. Therefore, a high concentration can be identified for Spain. These data suggests the centrality that Spain is occupying as a country with a mature research agenda regarding educational areas, as a result of the changes in the government policy for promoting scientific production (Masip, 2011), pressing for the increase of productivity in terms of high impact scientific publications. In Appendix 1, the count of publications by country is tabulated and, in Figure 8.1 (produced with the use of Tableau), the frequency of publications for each represented country is detailed. As for RQ3 there is a clear trend in the direction of research about educational processes placed in formal academic contexts, with 74 sources (87.05% of total sources computed).Within these institutional contexts, studies on basic education are favoured (30 sources, equivalent to 35.29%) and on higher education, at the undergraduate level (22.35%). The levels of preschool, upper secondary education (baccalaureate) and postgraduate are behind in this count with only one, three and four sources, respectively.With much less representation would be the orientation of this line of research located in non-formal and informal contexts (11 sources). The data are revealing, since they suggest that the research agenda of dialogic processes still focuses primarily on education in formal educational institutions (schools, colleges, Normal schools, universities, etc.) rather than in any other environment such as museums, digital social networks or community centres. This represents a niche of opportunity for the generation of new contributions related to informal and non-formal learning processes, as well as their multiple relationships with educational institutions and other sectors. Finally, as to RQ4, to identify the topics where the articles are focused, we used the Thesaurus of Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), developed by the Institute of Education 104

Approaches in Ibero-American countries

Figure 8.1 Geographical distribution map of publications in the area of dialogic education.

Sciences (IES) of the US Department of Education, which offers a catalogue of descriptors or keywords for the standardized categorization of themes. The authors of this chapter worked collaboratively to agree on the use of these descriptors (Petersen, Feldt, Mujtaba, & Mattsson, 2008) for all the sources included in the corpus. The methodology of the keywording process also involved grouping the ERIC Thesaurus descriptors in seven dimensions. The dimension with more articles (25) and citations (252) is Social Justice and Inclusion (D1), which represents studies that conceive dialogic education as a strategy aimed at social and political transformation for the construction of a more egalitarian, inclusive and fairer society, with community participation. In second place, there is the Ethics and Citizenship dimension (D2), which has the main purpose of building relational skills, social attitudes and moral behaviour. This dimension includes 20 studies that accumulate 189 citations. The third place corresponds to the studies on Literacy (D3), in which interaction mediated by texts is the protagonist of the dialogic educational process. In this dimension, 12 studies that group 131 citations are categorized. In fourth place, the dimension Speech in Interaction (D4) emphasizes oral participation, conversation and the exchange of speech acts as the central focus of observation of the dialogic educational experience. It is interesting that this dimension is more robust in number of citations than the previous one, with 170 citations spread over only 9 articles. In fifth place, 105

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the dimension of Educational Context (D5) involves studies in which dialogic education is conceptualized as focused on solving typical problems of a specific level or educational context (8 articles and 41 citations).The dimension of Formative Purpose (D6) groups 6 studies examining dialogic education as a means for developing academic skills or disciplinary skills (42 citations). Finally, in the dimension Digital Technology and Emerging Educational Trends (D7), the focus of the dialogic educational experience is the educational use of digital technologies and the innovative pedagogical trends associated with them (5 articles with 32 citations). See Figure 8.2 for a graphic summary of these results. As for RQ5, the 16 most cited articles (with 15 citations or more) are listed in Table 8.3. It is interesting to note that of these 16 articles, 12 correspond to empirical contributions (75%), while only 2 of these highly cited articles in the line of dialogical studies correspond to theoretical-conceptual contributions (12.5%), and 2 are contributions that report educational experiences (12.5%). An analysis of the previous table reveals the prominence of certain thematic areas defined by the number of citations for each dimension (see Table 8.2). For instance, it is interesting to note that participatory action research processes and critical perspectives (D1), as well as citizen training (D2 ) are shared by 8 of the 16 articles of this selection, which marks an influence of these thematic areas in the research agenda of the studies carried out, which not only seek to document the educational experience of interest for a given author but also to influence the possibility of promoting social change and the empowerment of participants, through the awareness of their own circumstances and their opportunities of transformation. It is also noteworthy that literacy (D3) is likewise a privileged field or research topic: six items have this focus, highlighting the semiotic value of oral and written language in mediating dialogic and participatory processes studied in formal and non-formal educational environments and for academic and literary purposes. Finally, it is important to note the emphasis on dialogic processes of talk-in-interactions, such as argumentation, communicative competence, collaboration and sociocognitive development (D4), which indicates a preference for documenting the sequential analysis of speaking turns and the detailed participation situated moment by moment, as features of the interactional materiality that constitutes the possibility of having a dialogue.

7. Digital technology and emerging educaonal trends 6. Disciplinary educaonal purpose 5. Educaonal context 4. Talk in interacon 3. Literacy 2. Ethics and cizenship 1. Jusce and social inclusion 0

50

Number of citaons per dimension

100

150

200

250

Number of items per dimension

Figure 8.2 Number of articles and citations by dimension.

106

300

8 (9.41 %)

6 (7.05 %)

5 (5.88 %)

D5

D6

D7

85

9 (10.58 %)

D4

Total

12 (14.11 %)

D3

Interaction mediated by texts is the protagonist of the dialogic educational process. 4. Talk in interaction Oral participation, conversation, exchange of speech acts are the focus of observation of the dialogic educational experience. 5. Educational Dialogic education aims to solve typical context problems of a specific educational level or context 6. Disciplinary Dialogic education is conceived as a educational means for the development of certain purpose academic disciplinary skills or abilities. 7. Digital technology The focus of the dialogic educational and emerging experience is the educational use of educational trends digital technologies and innovative educational trends associated with them.

3. Literacy

2. Ethics and citizenship

Tutoring, Informal Education, Web 2.0 Technologies, Films

Teacher Education, Higher Education, Adolescents, School Relationships, Community STEM, Mathematics, Science Education, Languages

857

32

42

41

Communicative Competence, Interaction, 170 Group Dynamics

20 (23.52 %)

D2

Dialogic education is a strategy aimed at social and political transformation for the construction of a less unequal, more just and inclusive society, with community participation. Dialogic education has the mission of building relational capacities, social attitudes and moral behaviours.

Special Education, Interculturality, Cultural 252 Education, Ethnography, Social Justice, Social Change,Violence, Gender Issues, Educational Assessment, Community Cooperation, Participatory Research Ethics, Citizenships Education, 189 Environmental Education, Political Attitudes, Community Involvement, Bullying Critical Literacy, Literacy Education 131

1. Justice and social inclusion

25 (29.41%)

D1

Number of citations per dimension

Related keywords

Acronym of the Number of items per Name of the dimension Description dimension dimension

Table 8.2 Emerging dimensions in the process of keywording in the area of dialogic education

Gozalvez Perez, Vicent; ContrerasPulido, Paloma Rojas-Drummond, ‘Dialogic scaffolding’: Learning, Culture and Social Enhancing learning S., Torreblanca, Interaction and understanding O., Pedraza, H., in collaborative Vélez, M., & contexts Guzmán, K. International Escobar Urmeneta, Learning to become Journal of Cristina a CLIL teacher: Bilingual teaching, reflection Education and and professional Bilingualism development

Cambridge Journal Turning difficulties of Education into possibilities: Engaging Roma families and students in school through dialogic learning Comunicar Empowering media citizenship through educommunication

Flecha, Ramón; Soler, Marta

Publication title

Title

Author

2

3,YES 16

11–21

334–353

1

42

129–136

43

English

English

Spanish

English

Volume Language

4

Issue

451–465

Pages

Table 8.3 The 16 most cited articles of mapping and their thematic areas

1

1

2

1

Q2 Type of article 1 = Research article 2 = Art. of reflection or essay 3 = Experiences or didactic proposals 4 = Art. of revision 5 = Other

44

51

53

115

Q3 No. of citations in Google Scholar

Spain

Mexico

Spain

Spain

Dimension

D3

D2

Collaborative work, D4 teacher training, empowerment

Literacy, collaborative writing

Critical literacy, citizenship, empowerment

D1 Participatory action research, empowerment

Thematic areas Q4 Country/ region Country or region to which the article refers.

Álvarez-Álvarez, C .; PascualDíez, J.

Case study on the training of critical readers using literary texts in elementary education

Ocnos

Hennessy, S., Rojas- Developing a coding Learning Culture and Social scheme for Drummond, Interaction analysing classroom S., Higham, R., dialogue across Márquez, AM, educational Maine, F., Ríos, contexts RM, … Barrera, MJ The benefits of shared Educación XX1 Goikoetxea book reading: A Iraola, Edurne; brief review Martinez Perena, Naroa Porto, Melina Intercultural citizenship Language and Intercultural education in an Communication EFL online project in Argentina Research in the Learning to write a Castello, Teaching of research article: Montserrat; English Ph.D. students’ Inesta, Anna; transitions toward Corcelles, disciplinary writing Mariona regulation Foro de Educación Community School Barron Ruiz, gardens: forging Angela;Munoz socio-educational Rodriguez, Jose spaces in and for Manuel sustainability 4

19

442–477

213–239

10

2

245–261

27–53

18

1

303–323

13

47

14

9

16–44

Spanish

Spanish

English

English

English

1

1

1

3

1

1

18

19

24

27

27

35

Spain

Spain

Spain

Argentina

Spain

Mexico/ UK

D4

Critical literacy, participatory action research

Community participation, sustainability, participatory action research

Academic literacy

(Continued )

D3

D2

D3

D3 Literacy, socioaffective aspects, collaborative work Citizenship, Critical D2 literacy,

Communicative competence

Title

Publication title

Dias, Teresa Silva;Menezes, Isabel

Ortega, FJR; Bargalló, CM; Alzate, OTS

Children and adolescents as political actors: Collective visions of politics and citizenship

Journal of Moral Education

Enseñanza de las Teachers’ change of ciencias conceptions on argumentation and its development in science class Villalta Páucar,MA; School knowledge and Perfiles Educativos cognitive processes Budnik, in learning CA;Valencia, interaction in the SM classroom Language Policy Zavala,Virginia Ancestral language to speak with the “Other”: closing down ideological spaces of a language policy in the Peruvian Andes

Author

Table 8.3 Continued

43

3

250–268

13

1

1–20

35

141

84–96

32

Q2 Type of article 1 = Research article 2 = Art. of reflection or essay 3 = Experiences or didactic proposals 4 = Art. of revision 5 = Other

English

English

1

2

English; 1 Spanish

English; 1 Spanish

Volume Language

3

Issue

53–70

Pages

16

17

17

18

Q3 No. of citations in Google Scholar

Portugal

Peru

Chile

Colombia

D6

Dimension

Citizenship, participatory action research

D2

D4 Sociocognitive theories of teacher development and mediation Critical perspective, D1 literacy

Teacher training, critical perspective, argumentation

Thematic areas Q4 Country/ region Country or region to which the article refers.

Jordi Muntaner, Joan; Pinya, Carme; De la Iglesia, Begona

Reyes-Angona, S.; FernándezCárdenas, J. M.; Martínez Martínez, R.

507–535 Revista Mexicana Blog communities de Investigación for academic Educativa writing in higher education: A case of educational innovation in Mexico Revista Electrónica 141–159 Assessment of Interuniversitaria interactive de Formación groups from the del Profesorado inclusive education paradigm

18

18

57

1

Spanish

Spanish

3

1

15

15

Spain

Mexico

D3

D1 Collaborative learning, teacher training

Participatory research, academic literacy

Fernández-Cárdenas and Reyes-Angona

Regarding RQ6, the Systematic Review revealed some recurrent features in the contemporary characterization of the field of dialogical education in Ibero-America, around four markers of observation. Next, we present the main insights for each marker.

Methodologies Within the diversity of methodological approaches, qualitative ethnographic and narrative research studies hold a significant place in this knowledge field, as does the use of interviews as a source of phenomenological data. This type of research not only offers access to the perspective of participants about their educational interactions but also serves as a platform to give voice to those whose voices are silenced or not heard because of their location on the margins of educational, institutional or political discourses.This critical ethnography, therefore, aims to “expose practices that are socially unfair” (López-Gopar, 2014, p. 296). There are also several sources that, although not numerically significant, are relevant as examples of methodologies with a more complex or mixed design. This is the case of the analysis that Briones and Lara (2016) make of an international collaboration for ethical training through online forums, with a quasi-experimental design that includes content analysis of the participants’ evaluations of their experience. In any case, the constant in the studies reviewed is the definition of the methodological design as a tool for political transformation. In this line, the critical pedagogy proposed by Flecha and Villarejo (2015) is noteworthy and, in particular, the prevalence of studies using participatory action research. Participatory research has emblematic precursors in Ibero-America, such as the work of Fals-Borda in Colombian peasant communities (e.g. Fals-Borda, 1985) and the work of Paulo Freire with adult education in Brazil. Also, in comparison with traditional research from other regions such as the United Kingdom or the United States of America, the analysis of talk-in-interaction is under-represented in Ibero-America, although some studies do offer a useful interactional perspective for understanding the mechanisms of dialogue in action, as shown in the studies by Castelló, Inesta and Corcelles (2013), Badia and Becerril (2016) and those carried out by Rojas-Drummond et al. (Hennessy et al., 2016; Rojas-Drummond,Torreblanca, Pedraza,Vélez, & Guzmán, 2013; RojasDrummond et al., 2017).

Dynamics of dialogic models The educational experiences investigated promote horizontality in the relationship of participants in a relatively spontaneous and organic environment, without protocols, thus characterizing dialogue with these traits. Specific dialogic organizational forms stand out, such as peer-to-peer editing, co-evaluation, social gatherings, group discussions, multidisciplinary cooperation and multilingualism. The objective of these social forms is to activate participation and guarantee access to speaking turns for subjects and communities traditionally ignored. With this, dialogic education, implicitly or explicitly, allows a deconstruction of the still dominant logic and educational rhetoric based on competence and performance. In exchange, dialogic education does not produce a single counterhegemonic discourse but rather a diaspora of local, atomized, largely disconnected alternatives between them. Examples of this are the articles of the Literacy dimension (D3), in which the authors rarely cite each other and seem to be unaware of each other’s work. One of the key organizational aspects of these educational

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dialogues is usually an experience shared by participants, as in the case of the dialogue-based literary gatherings (Aubert, 2015; Elboj, 2015; Flecha, 2015; Racionero-Plaza, 2015). In these gatherings, the community is built around a goal that brings participants together and challenges them to find solutions to a shared problem. Dialogue can create a relational territory that also makes visible conflict, and we would suggest that the literature reviewed does not yet offer enough academic evidence about the identification of these events, the strategies for repairing such potential misunderstandings or the emotional management of conflicts. In this sense, there is, from our point of view, an opportunity for research innovation here, perhaps detailing how speaking turns are organized and the functions performed by different actors to maintain the relationship between participants.

Learning trajectories The dialogic principles that underlie the educational experiences studied include the affirmation of the “we” and the empathy towards “the other”. These principles can be valuable conceptual tools for revealing symbolic dimensions that may be in conflict and that underlie educational practices. Such is the case with the implementation of Quechua revitalization policies in the Andean region; the ethnographic research of Zavala (2014) reveals identity tensions experienced by key actors in this process, such as urban migrants from Quechuaspeaking areas. Their perception of Quechua as an ancestral language, associated with their rural communities of origin, inhibits its expansion as a living language for communication. Zavala relates these discourses to colonial superstructures that still survive within these linguistic communities. One of the most significant contributions of the dialogic perspective is its usefulness for the integration of heterogeneous knowledge and cultural communities. This is the case of the intercultural gatherings (Valls-Carol, 2014) of the Federation of Adult Cultural and Educational Associations (FACEPA), which function as fora for reflection on gender violence. These circles have a mixed structure: On the one hand, women especially affected by this violence (migrants, domestic workers and housewives) and, on the other hand, researchers and academics of gender studies. In these contexts, the recognition of the other’s knowledge as complementary and as stimulation for constructing new knowledge are the traits defining dialogue.

Ideology Consistent with the comments regarding the forms of dialogue, one of the purposes of this research field in Ibero-America is to question the status quo and denounce the structural causes of dominant practices in educational environments. Good examples of this perspective are the articles that question the premises of intercultural policies (Ortega, 2013; Mateos Cortés & Dietz, 2014), which solidify a univocal, monolithic, mythified, “pure” identity of certain vulnerable groups, condemning them to function as subaltern cultural communities. Faced with these policies, a model of “transformative interculturality” is proposed, which promotes the mutual learning of both communities in tension: The dominant and the dominated. In this sense, the studies on dialogic education in the region are, from a Kuhnian perspective, manifestations against “normal science” and, in general, represent an anomaly with regard to the ideological and pedagogical paradigms established in the educational field from colonial countries. Therefore, the studies analysed in this chapter constitute a scientific vantage point

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from which to question and de-normalize institutional practices and the dominant public policies in the region. This emancipatory agenda is positioned in favour of different subjects and communities who have been historically inhibited or marginalized, such as indigenous communities (Valdivia, 2017; Candela, 2013), rural communities (Vigo & Bozalongo, 2014), women in situations of violence (Aubert, 2015), urban poverty (as beggars, migrants, gypsies, see the work of Flecha & Soler, 2013), disabled participants (Reynaga-Peña et al., 2018) and school teachers struggling for the appropriation and mastery of scientific knowledge (Montgomery & Fernández-Cárdenas, 2018; Fernández-Limón, Fernandez-Cardenas, & Gomez Galindo, 2018), among others.

Discussion The systematic mapping review presented in this chapter reveals the contemporary relevance of dialogic education in Ibero-America. The scientific production of this region with greater international influence, beyond its diversity, focuses its attention on the political condemnation of the multiple inequalities that persist in different societies and proposes alternative educational models more oriented to social transformation than to the development of specific competences: That is, dialogic education is conceptualized as an act of resistance, as a micro-power (Naim, 2013) located locally, against the consolidation of global neoliberal macro policies that make education a product and learning a measurable result (Martínez-Rodríguez & FernándezHerrería, 2017). Paulo Freire continues to be the main guide in the region, inspiring educational proposals based on an equal relationship with the other. To educate, therefore, is to listen, to critically question about the conditions of oppression experienced by the community of participants who learn and, based on that awareness, promote a transformative political action. Bakhtin, in turn, provides the conceptual base of educational experiences oriented towards the development of an inclusive relationship with the other. Bakhtin, from his philological perspective, focuses his attention on the analysis of speech genres and the philosophical justification of ethics, while Freire, pedagogue and activist, places the local community in the foreground and works for the development of an educational-political practice. While Bakhtin proposes an ethics based on the polyphonic aesthetics of a plurality of voices (Çalişkan, 2006; Fernández-Cárdenas, 2014, 2018), Freire proposes an ethics based on the aesthetics of emancipation, highlighting the sublime beauty that can represent liberation from the conditions of the oppressor (Lewis, 2012; Manrique, 2016). It is worth reviewing these alternatives in more detail if we want to be more ambitious in the possibilities for transforming current educational practices in order to address shared problems in a local and a global agenda. Finally, in the Latin American region, as argued by Flecha and Soler (2013), the extended educational model driven by competences develops instrumental learning, but, along with this, the model undermines the political function of educational institutions as privileged spaces of critical reflection, of counterbalance for structural social inequalities and the commercial pressures of globalization. In contrast to the use that can be made in other regions of the notion of dialogic education as a pedagogical model, the Ibero-American context highlights its ethical and political potential. Thus, this region is, due to its own critical and anti-hegemonic idiosyncrasy, inclined to position itself on the margins of the global agenda as part of a resistance, aspiring to generate enough argumentative strength to legitimize its efforts to implement a more influential transformative agenda. 114

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Appendix 1. Ibero-American countries with publications on dialogic education, 2013–2018 Country

Articles

Argentina Brazil Chile Colombia Spain Mexico Peru Portugal Venezuela

2 2 7 5 50 13 1 4 1

TOTAL

85

Note 1 The corpus before and after the inclusion/exclusion criteria is available at: https://www.zotero.org/ groups/2232553/dialogic_educational_approaches_in_ibero-american_countries/items

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SECTION II

Classroom dialogue

CLASSROOM DIALOGUE Paul Warwick and Victoria Cook

Classroom interaction is complex. Talk, of various forms, is central to this interaction, but it is ‘slippery’ (to quote a term used by Neil Mercer). Each day, in classrooms around the world, teachers and students use talk for a range of purposes. Teachers can be directive, persuasive, inclusive or challenging, depending on the task or the learning intention; most importantly, teachers work hard to tailor their talk to accommodate the needs and characteristics of the students who are in front of them. Students themselves will use talk to be disputational, playful, collaborative or supportive, again depending on the situations in which they find themselves and the characteristics of their peers. Thus, talk in the classroom is multifaceted, and the use of talk embraces a range of purposes pertinent to the classroom situation. As Mortimer and Scott (2003) have shown, teachers can, in different phases of a lesson, move from a use of talk to engage children in the interchange of thoughts and perspectives, to a situation where a more authoritative tone is taken as the subject narrative is pursued. Talk ‘acts’ themselves can have different purposes and are bound by the contexts in which they are employed. It is within this complicated scenario – the classroom – that a theoretical and practical understanding of what constitutes classroom dialogue is situated. Characterising classroom dialogue, for example as exploratory talk (Barnes, 1976; Mercer, 2000), accountable talk (Resnick, Michaels and O’Connor, 2010) or academically productive talk (Michaels and O’Connor, 2015), is an endeavour with a considerable history, as authors in this section detail. Despite clear cultural differences in its overall characterisation (Alexander, 2001), there seems to be a remarkable unanimity – at least amongst those who adopt a broadly Vygotskian understanding of the nature of learning – about its broad characteristics and about the educational intentions of its use (though see the following for ‘another side of the story’). Thus, children sharing their ideas openly, reasoning using evidence, building on and challenging the ideas of others – and the modelling and support of such features of dialogue by the teacher in interactions with students – are actions through which it seems classroom dialogue may be developed. Such actions are directed towards several goals that both mesh with and extend an understanding of the ‘role’ of schooling. These include promoting an understanding of complex subject narratives, so that students become competent ‘speakers of subjects’ rather than reciters of knowledge; developing a metacognitive understanding of the value of such talk for learning; understanding the importance of participation in the social setting of the classroom for individual and collective cognitive growth; building affective aspects of the person that are known 121

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to influence attainment, such as positive attitudes to schooling; and furthering the opportunities for students of inclusion in society. Interestingly, research over many years has evidenced a range of connections between the implementation of a more dialogic pedagogy in the classroom, framed broadly as it is presented previously, and the achievement of such goals. In particular, the relationship between classroom dialogue and the development of reasoning and subject attainment has received specific attention, and each of our chapter authors reference this range of work. Given this established and accumulating evidence, however, our authors also note, as many have done before them, that the ‘dialogic classroom’ is comparatively rare. This may be a function of the fact that, as we have already stated, the use of talk in classrooms is multifaceted. Perhaps there is no such thing as a ‘dialogic classroom’, because dialogue may only be appropriate during certain lesson phases or for particular purposes. Some have suggested that classroom dialogue is rarely actually dialogic in character, in a Bakhtinian sense – with a range of perspectives leading to the co-construction of genuinely new knowledge – since the classroom is an environment where talk is almost always in response to the parameters of culturally defined subject knowledge (Wegerif, 2008); this idea is pursued, in the wider context of developing democratic pedagogical practice, in Chapter 14 by Mayer, O’Connor and Lefstein, of which more in due course. For a moment, however, let us remain with teachers and researchers who found their work principally on a broadly Vygotskian frame of reference. For these, a core concern is with the low incidence of the use of dialogue in teacher–student and student–student interactions when this would actually help ‘interthinking’ and learning. In other words, it seems that in many classrooms, and across countries, opportunities for promoting dialogue, as described previously, are often missed.This may be because implementing a more dialogic pedagogy requires both intent and time, as evident from the chapters in this section that discuss the processes through which teachers and students begin to adopt a more ‘dialogic stance’ (Boyd, 2015) in classrooms. And it is an endeavour that needs to engage, and usually challenges, a range of stakeholders. Teachers need to be prepared to examine their practice and make changes on the basis of the evidence. This includes not only how they might model dialogue in their interactions with students; it is also about developing the classroom ethos – using strategies such as ground rules for talk and ‘talk about talk’ with their students (Edwards-Groves and Davidson, Chapter 9 in this volume; Mercer and Dawes, 2008) – to create an environment in which dialogue, rather than simply response, is seen as acceptable. Without this environment, it is rather hard to see how the most important stakeholder, the student, might wish to ‘actively participate in the negotiation of both the content and structure of classroom discourse’ (Aguiar, Mortimer and Scott, 2010, p. 174). But it goes further. School managements need to be fully supportive of this undertaking, providing time and resources for professional development activities that allow teachers to reflect on, and develop, practice. Here, researchers have a direct responsibility to both ensure that theoretical perspectives on classroom dialogue are debated, tested and evidenced and to inform and include school communities in advancing the pedagogies that best support classroom dialogue.This may include the involvement of universities in research–practice partnerships, where techniques such as video analysis can be used to examine the relationship between elements of dialogic practice (see Chapter 12 by Gaowei Chen). Or it might include, for example, research in naturalistic settings that attempts to open up the ‘black box’ of productive dialogue within and across different subjects (see Chapter 13 by Howe, Hennessy and Mercer). This is not a ‘top-down’ process (whoever one sees at ‘the top’). All stakeholders, and especially the students, have a great deal to both gain from, and contribute to, the process of developing talk for learning in classrooms. This is recognised by Edwards-Groves and Davidson in

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their chapter on the role and utility of metatalk in the early years of schooling, where they argue that both teachers and students are important agents of change in developing a dialogic classroom. Continuing this theme of implementation and change, Frank Hardman’s chapter, which charts the development of a dialogic pedagogy and documents the mounting evidence of its effectiveness, discusses the challenges that may be faced by policy makers, teacher educators and teachers seeking to implement, and scale up, a ‘dialogic approach’ to classroom interaction. One potential response to these challenges is offered by Jan Hardman, who introduces a theoretically grounded discourse analytical framework that could be used by teachers and students seeking to implement a dialogic pedagogy, a tool for the micro-analysis of dialogic episodes using computerised software. In a similar vein, Chen’s chapter focuses on how visual analytics (such as the Classroom Discourse Analyzer) may be used to facilitate the analysis of classroom talk to inform teacher professional learning and classroom practice. And here, further weight is added to the mounting evidence of the effectiveness of a dialogic pedagogy by Howe et al., who discuss the productivity of different patterns of classroom dialogue, focusing upon attainment outcomes in both teacher–student interactions and group work in primary schools. If you find yourself in broad agreement with most of what we have said so far (and even if you don’t), read Mayer, O’Connor and Lefstein’s challenging Chapter 14. Here, the authors provide a provocative contribution to the discussion of what might constitute classroom dialogue in a democratic society in which, even with the best intentions of all concerned (which cannot be taken for granted), many voices are currently excluded or marginalised. Drawing on the work of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Dewey, Biesta, Wegerif and others, the authors note the tensions in ‘positioning all students as creative and capable participants in the work of the classroom’ whilst simultaneously extending and developing the cultural frameworks of canonical content knowledge. In doing so, they point to the apparent contradictions in dialogic and dialectic intentions in the classroom and propose working towards genuinely democratic pedagogical practice (Dewey, 1938, 1944; Biesta, 2014) through ‘polyphonic encounters’ in the classroom. This is a challenge not just to ‘traditionalist’ teachers, nor just to our knowledge-focused, highly accountable school systems; it challenges those of us who might have thought that we were genuinely engaging in dialogic teaching or in research into dialogic teaching, by asking ‘simple’ questions about the engagement of all class members in forwarding collective understanding of one another and of our subjectified culture(s).We hope that you find this, and the other chapters in this section, illuminating.

References Aguiar, O. G., Mortimer, E. F. and Scott, P. (2010). Learning from and responding to students’ questions: The authoritative and dialogic tension. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 47(2), 174–193. Alexander, R. J. (2001). Culture and Pedagogy: International Comparisons in Primary Education. Oxford: Blackwell. Barnes, D. (1976/1992). From Communication to Curriculum (2nd edn). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/ Cook-Heinemann. Biesta, G. J. J. (2014). The Beautiful Risk of Education. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Boyd, M. (2015). Dialogic teaching and dialogic stance: Moving beyond interactional form. Research in the Teaching of English, 49, 272–296. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education. New York: Free Press. Dewey, J. (1944). Democracy and Education. New York: Free Press. (Original work published 1916.) Mercer, N. (2000). Words and Minds. London: Routledge. Mercer, N. and Dawes, L. (2008). The value of exploratory talk. In N. Mercer & S. Hodgkinson (Eds.), Exploring Talk in School (pp. 55–71). London: Sage.

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Paul Warwick and Victoria Cook Michaels, S. and O’Connor, C. (2015). Conceptualizing talk moves as tools: professional development approaches for academically productive discussions. In L. B. Resnick, C. S. C. Asterhan and S. N.Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 347–361). Washington, DC: AERA. Mortimer, E. F. and Scott, P. H. (2003). Meaning Making in Secondary Science Classrooms. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Resnick, L., Michaels, S. and O’Connor, C. (2010). How (well structured) talk builds the mind. In R. Sternberg and D. Preiss (Eds.), From Genes to Context: New Discoveries About Learning from Educational Research and Their Applications. New York: Springer. Wegerif, R. (2008). Dialogic or dialectic? The significance of ontological assumptions in research on educational dialogue. British Educational Research Journal, 34(3), 347.

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9 METATALK FOR A DIALOGIC TURN IN THE FIRST YEARS OF SCHOOLING Christine Edwards-Groves and Christina Davidson

Classroom talk as a field of study The centrality of classroom talk for teaching and learning has been a substantial matter of inquiry for researchers across the globe for many decades. Howe and Abedin’s (2013) comprehensive review of 40 years of research focused on classroom talk establishes a strong foundation of influential research investigating the nature and role of talk in teaching for learning. Much of the early work, predominantly emanating from the UK (e.g. Britton, 1970; Barnes, 1976; Edwards & Westgate, 1987) and the US (e.g. Cazden, 1972, 1988; Flanders, 1970; Mehan, 1979), has been largely responsible for steering the direction of research on dialogic education beyond its taken-for-grantedness in pedagogical practice. Motivated by aspirations to understand and promote the efficacy of teaching and learning in lessons across the years of schooling, studies examining the character, influence and improvement of lesson talk and its function in establishing dialogicality have shaped educational practice worldwide. The effort in this field of educational scholarship has typically been to show how language, its structures and processes create the ways institutional talk, itself, creates conditions for educational work to be done; that is to say, education is achieved through cultural-discursive practices that influence the talk practices in schools (Kemmis & Edwards-Groves, 2018). Such classroom talk is also distinctively patterned (Alexander, 2006; Edwards & Westgate, 1987; Flanders, 1970) and noticeably different from home or community-based talk (Wells, 1981). Drawing on data from research examining the development and enactment of dialogic pedagogies across the primary grades, the chapter presents new understandings about the role and utility of metatalk in lessons. Metatalk is talk about dialogue. Specifically, talk that goes beyond more commonplace managerial orientations that typically orient young students towards turntaking vis-à-vis conventional directive-compliance routines such as “put your hand up to speak”, “speak clearly”, “wait your turn” or “don’t interrupt” (Edwards-Groves & Davidson, 2017a).The chapter focuses on empirical data gathered in early years classrooms since research reporting on metatalk in the foundation stages of school learning is a small field of inquiry. It begins by introducing some principal literature critical to the field of dialogic teaching and metatalk. After the conceptual basis and a brief description of the study are presented, the main analytic findings that make connections between metatalk and dialogic education are given. Finally, the contribution this chapter makes is highlighted. 125

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Talk and interaction in a dialogic classroom Different theoretical and methodological traditions are drawn on to study school talk.The body of accumulated research indicates ways in which classrooms are arenas of rapid-fire and complicated patterns of talk consisting of systems of direction and compliance, usually in some form of routine question-and-answer sequences (Freiberg & Freebody, 1995). These routines are commonly organised as a three-part turn-sequence known as the IRF (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975) or the IRE (Mehan, 1979). Generally speaking, a teacher will initiate the topic of talk mainly through a question (I ), a student or chorus of students respond in one way or another (R), and the teacher gives feedback on, or provides evaluation of, the response (F or E ). This enduring teacher–student–teacher turn-taking structure dominates much lesson talk (Skidmore, 2006). Consequently, considerable work on dialogic education stems from understanding ways that a more impoverished IRF exchange structure in lessons can be disrupted to open up a participatory space for extended turns by students. Scholarship focused on classroom talk has collectively generated a comprehensive language for practitioners from early years to tertiary contexts to interpret and discuss it in the disciplines. Yet, developing a shared language and collective understandings about classroom talk and interaction among teachers, and with and among their students, largely remains takenfor-granted in practice. Meaning, talk about talk and interaction has not ostensibly translated into more widely practised pedagogical discourses, actions and interactions in principled and comprehensible ways in actual lessons (Alexander, 2004). This is particularly notable in the early years of schooling when young children’s interactional competences upon entering school are largely overlooked or misunderstood in pedagogical discourses, actions and interactions (Edwards-Groves & Davidson, 2017a; Willes, 1983). To address this issue, this chapter examines how metatalk involving explicit talk about dialogue in classrooms shifts how teachers and young students participate and “cue in to” (as expressed by Gumperz & Hymes, 1972) lesson talk in dynamic ways. In recent decades, much research on classroom talk practices as it relates to pedagogical efficacy has moved towards a focus on dialogic teaching (see for example works this volume). The nature and influence of dialogue in classrooms has been shown to be comprehensively and unrelievedly dependent on the talk and interaction patterns at play in the sequential flow of teacher– student question–answer exchanges in lessons (French & MacLure, 1981; Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). Notwithstanding advances in understandings, it has been argued that lessons, and so the pedagogies of which they are comprised, are interactive events (Edwards-Groves, 2003). Researching dialogic approaches in the conduct of lessons has been concerned with understanding pedagogy as being contingent on interactions (Alexander, 2004, 2006) and thus, requires documenting teacher–student and student–student conversational exchanges and their capacity for opening up opportunities for engaging in highly productive talk in lessons. It has been shown that more fully developed pedagogical dialogues not only assist students’ thinking and learning (Mercer & Littleton, 2007) but are pivotal for leveraging students’ oral language and literacy development (Alexander, 2006; Barnes, 1976; Britton, 1970) through more dynamic talk moves and mutually “accountable” classroom discussions (Anderson, Chapin & O’Connor, 2011; Michaels, O’Connor & Resnick, 2008). It is talk that prioritises deepening students’ understandings as they think about, enact (“go public”) and evaluate meanings taken from classroom talk, tasks and texts (Edwards-Groves, Anstey & Bull, 2014). Yet, an undeniable problem lies in the fact that in lessons where the goal is to support students to develop oral language, speech and interactional competencies, teachers remain the dominant speakers and managers of interactions. 126

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Understanding metatalk The concept of metatalk draws attention to talk about talk-in-interactions or more simply talk about dialogue. About metatalk, social anthropologist Debra Schriffin (1980) (inspired by mentors Goffman 1974, Labov 1972 and Zimmerman 1978) wrote that “language can be used to talk about itself, that is, it can serve as its own meta-language” (p. 200). At a time when the study of metatalk was fledgling, Schriffin examined the ways that human beings can make sense of their discourse (their own and that of their interlocutors) by making the topic of language-intalk an object of its own. Guided by these questions how is talk about talk integrated into a discourse? where does it occur and why does it occur there? she studied the linguistic properties that characterises talk as it is simultaneously distributed in discourse. From that time metatalk has been variously defined and/or described by other scholars in the field of dialogic education. In common, they share the basic principle that metatalk is explicit talk about the talk produced in conversations and focuses on both one’s own talk and that of interlocutors. Mercer and Dawes (2008) argued for an explication of talk for its own sake, suggesting that when students are encouraged to make their thinking ‘hearable’ in and through their talk they can become more aware of it and the power it can have to help them think and listen more deeply and critically. The place of talk for thinking is a rendering of metatalk that considers it an artefact of discourse important for consciousness-raising (Schleppegrell, 2013), where particular linguistic features are characterised or made apparent as they happen interactionally in conversations. For Swain (1998), metatalk is the use of language to reflect on and critique language-in-use that accounts for the “simultaneous interplay between the content frame and the interaction frame” (Barnes & Todd, 1977, pp. 20–21). It is an idea Swain and Lapkin (1998) considered to be “any part of a dialogue where the students talk about the language they are producing, question their language use, or correct themselves or others” (p. 326). Their study conducted in secondary French immersion classrooms in Canada found that the language students produce during collaborative dialogues, for example, leads to shared meanings being more readily remembered and reproduced. In the UK Myhill and Newman (2016) argued that how teachers manage metatalk during instructional interactions is critical for the development of metalinguistic understandings in writing. Specifically, they explored the close relationship between high-quality metatalk and creating open dialogic spaces for primary aged students to investigate meaning making in text construction. Newman’s subsequent study (2016) in secondary classrooms showed “that metatalk can support the development of a language for reflecting on interpersonal group dynamics while promoting self-conscious participation in collaborative talk” (p. 108). Her analysis examining student talk in a specifically designed group activity concluded that: metatalk, which makes talk itself the object of its attention, supports students’ understanding about language and its interpersonal dimensions, while strengthening the possibility that this knowledge is applied in talk itself. (p. 125) This finding draws out the interplay between the epistemological, linguistic and interpersonal processes of metatalk for learning. Successively, Newman’s (2017) analysis delineated two types of metatalk: process metatalk and self-evaluative metatalk. Process metatalk considers how collaborative talk is done procedurally and involves explicit discussion and participant analysis of the interpersonal processes and characteristics of collaborative talk (p. 5), for instance, co-regulation of talk through listening, being on task, agreeing, exploring or expanding on alternative points of view. Self-evaluative metatalk considers that collaborative talk also involves reflecting on and 127

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critiquing the nature and quality of one’s participation (p. 7), for instance, being conscious about participation through managing different points of view or disputes, showing respect, recognising established “ground rules” for participating. Respectively, these types of metatalk illustrate either a general, future orientation about how talk should proceed, or a specific, past orientation about how previous instances of talk did proceed. Thus, as Schriffin (1980) noted, metatalk is not only focused on language production itself but also on how language and talk about language-in-use is integrated into classroom discourse. Collectively, what these studies show is the multidimensionality of metatalk and that distinguishing between its semantic, propositional, interpersonal, critical and procedural characteristics is possible. Nevertheless, many definitions leave implicit, general or even abstract how specific talk about dialogue is a critical feature of “doing metatalk” in lessons. Moreover, examining different realms of metatalk is rare in the early years of schooling.

Explicating talk about talk and interaction for a dialogic turn In their comprehensive ethnomethodological/conversation analytic (EM/CA) study of lesson talk in everyday literacy lessons in Australia, Freiberg and Freebody (1995) drew attention to the practical and conceptual significance of classroom talk as mutually-produced-courses-of-action (inspired by James Heap, 1985). Their findings significantly considered ways talk in lessons involves topics that form particular machinations of pedagogical routines that produce talk oriented to both propositional knowledge (involving conceptual resources) and procedural knowledge (involving logistical management about how it gets managed or accomplished). Yet, talk as an object itself has remained taken for granted by teachers in practice (Edwards-Groves et al., 2014). Specifically, and necessarily, there is a need for teachers to recognise the interplay between how talk in the turn exchange systems of classroom conversations requires both talk as a topic for itself and explicit knowledge of how its conduct in interactions is a necessary condition for communicating. It is a view that makes explicit the distinct doubleness upon which metatalk depends; specifically, that talk about talk (what is spoken and heard) alone is not sufficient, but that it must encompass talk about the interactions within which it simultaneously occurs and produces. Therefore, metatalk must not only focus on its process and self-evaluative characteristics (Newman, 2017) but in practice explicitly orient to dialogue using a mutually produced and understood metatalk that teachers and students share in the responsibility for co-producing (Edwards-Groves & Davidson, 2017b).The questions guiding this chapter are: How is talk about classroom talk and interaction understood, developed and produced in dialogues by teachers and by students? How is this metatalk integrated into lesson discourse as a resource for accomplishing lesson talk? What is its function and impact on classroom dialogues?

Brief description of the empirical study Empirical material is drawn from a nationally funded Australian study researching dialogic pedagogies across the primary years of schooling.1 The broader study involved 12 primary school teachers from the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, participating in a year-long critical participatory action research (CPAR) (Kemmis, McTaggart & Nixon, 2014).Teacher participants were nominated by system personnel based on their experience, knowledge and interest in literacy and ranged in age (23–45 years) and teaching experience (2–26 years). Classes spanned the primary school spectrum (from Kindergarten to Year 6) forming a comprehensive coverage of primary education stages of learning.2 Classrooms were located in schools varying from small rural schools, larger regional schools to metropolitan schools where the populations were 128

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mainly linguistically diverse students from Australian Aboriginal, refugee and migrant backgrounds. Many students from the city schools were described by their teachers as English as Additional Language Learners (EALL). Participating teachers were supported by academic researchers (the authors) to design their own action research projects focused on investigating and developing dialogic practices in their own classrooms.To build their individual projects, teachers participated in a range of research activities beginning with generating theories-of-practice that reflected their knowledge, experiences and communities. Initially teachers were introduced to the project in an introductory full-day seminar that included a half-day session focused on classroom talk and dialogic teaching and a half-day session on action research processes, data gathering, transcription and analysis. Teachers then met subsequently for two dialogue conferences to share, critique and adjust their projects; these conferences were supplemented by interim researcher visits and locally organised support meetings. Teachers were encouraged to independently gather and analyse recorded lessons between sessions. These research activities were designed for teachers to share and critique insights, key learnings and challenges experienced with the development of their own and other participant’s projects. A final lesson and interview were video-recorded in each teacher’s classroom. Data gathered in the two Kindergarten classrooms will be drawn on in this chapter.Thematic analysis was completed across the action research studies, and detailed conversation analysis of selected recorded and transcribed lessons was conducted (transcription symbols are presented in Appendix A). Changed talk patterns yielded changed talk-in-interaction that required the development of metatalk as an interactive resource. Specifically, for teachers and students in each classroom, participating in a dialogic classroom was demonstrated by changed ways of participating, understanding and managing (Newman, 2016, p. 109) and required knowing and articulating and sharing responsibility for the production of lesson talk (Edwards-Groves & Davidson, 2017a, p. 160). Next a close examination of transcripts of lesson talk in early years classrooms reveals how metatalk encompasses i) knowing and articulating involving talking explicitly about talk and interaction using a mutually produced and locally understood metalanguage; and ii) teachers and students sharing in the responsibility for co-producing discussions and associated context-relevant meanings.

Researching metatalk in early years classrooms Talk about dialogue emerged as a central feature of the discursive flow of instructional talk in the lessons studied. To exemplify this, transcript extracts drawn from two early years classrooms are considered – Cameron’s3 Kindergarten classroom and Stella’s Kindergarten/Year 1 (K/1) classroom. The first and second extracts address metatalk as found in instructional moments, both oriented to and exhibited in small group talk in Cameron’s Kindergarten classroom. In subsequent sections, extracts from Cameron and Stella’s whole class lessons show how teacher questioning enabled the production of locally contingent metatalk concerned with understanding, participating, managing and sharing responsibility for talk and interaction. Each example illustrates how orientations to talk about dialogue were witnessable in subsequent courses of interaction.

Instructional moments for teaching metatalk In the early years classrooms studied, teachers explicitly drew student’s attention to particular propositional and procedural dimensions of participating in discussions, appreciably changing the nature of the instructional talk in lessons. Extract 1a shows how the particular object of the book talk, initiated by Cameron (in lines 1–7), provided explication about how to build the discussion and to make ideas stronger. This specification provided interactional resources that 129

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for these students could be operationalised in the conduct of the discussion as it happens discursively but also foregrounds particular metatalk to be taken up in future talk. Extract 1a: What we’re concentrating on

1 Tch: okay gang what we’re going to concentrate on (0.2) 2 the focus of our lesson (0.2) can you see it written up 3 there (0.4) is building on each other’s ideas (0.2) okay 4 we’re gonna make them stronger (0.4) so someone 5 might comment on something (0.2) they might tell us 6 some information (0.2) and we’re going to build on that 7 idea as well (0.4) there was a pig (0.2) a pink pig sitting 8 on a rock (0.2) goodness said the frogs (0.2) why is there a 9 pig in our pond? they whisper amongst themselves until 10 finally the [chief spoke up 11 Mar: [what happened to that little frog that like (0.2) 12 has his little little (0.2) little thing there like very long 13 (tongue) coming out= 14     Ryl: =because u:::m je just got older and older and older 15 (0.2) he’s an old frog

Here Cameron’s talk about talk leveraged the book discussion among students in his Kindergarten class to make meaning of the book and at the same time to display, in their turns, the object of the discussion as introduced by Cameron (lines 3–4) to build on each other’s ideas and make them stronger. In their turns, after the opening of the reading, Marcy (lines 11–13) and Rylie (lines 14–15) produce building on, that is, the object of the talk was produced and so became witnessable in shaping the next sequence of dialogue, thus influencing the interactive courses of action. Endorsement of its relevance continued to be oriented to throughout the book talk, as evidenced in Extract 1b following, where concentrating on “building on each other’s ideas” to “make them stronger” is made apparent or visible (Mercer & Dawes, 2008) in subsequent student responses. Extract 1b: Building on and making ideas stronger

22 Tch: all the little pig said was RIBBIT h:::h it’s 23 really confused them hasn’t it= 24 Pen: =and [and they 25    [and that and [the 26 Pen:   [some of the frogs look silly and 27 some of the frogs look angry 28 Mar: like that pink frog (.) that’s like really angry (0.2) like one 29 ((Mar points to picture)) like looks scared (0.4) and looks 30 that one (.) and like the pink frogs are kind happy looking 31 well [like 32 Ron    [and 33 Ann:    [and they have to learn to read= 34 Ron: =and one is angrier (0.2) there ((points to the picture)) 35 Tch: hm::m some look really confused (0.2) some look angry 36 (0.4) they are really not sure how to take this pig 37 Ryl: that one looks crazy ((points to a picture on the page)) 130

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In this segment, students in turn are skilfully orienting to the ideas of each other as they collectively assemble a portrayal of the range of emotions represented in the illustration of the frogs in the book. They are building on the turns of others. The use of the word “and” (lines 24, 25, 32–33, 34) separates but also connects the distinct ideas raised by these students, indicating that the speaker at that moment is attempting to provide additional information – as per the instruction provided by Cameron at the outset (lines 1–7 in Extract 1a). Here, learning and learning to do talk differently became a consistent matter for discussion in the early years classrooms observed. What is notable about these extracts is that they illustrate the particularity of the metatalk these young students encountered, learned about and produced. Instructional moments provided opportunities for young students in their first year of school to become more adept at recognising and talking about dialogue in their lessons. Moreover, students “visibly” produced the object of the metatalk by building on the turns of others.

Noticing and naming trouble in talk Metatalk became an important resource for addressing “trouble” that occurred in lesson talk. Trouble in speaking, listening or understanding is talk or interaction that threatens the maintenance and progress of meaning making in interaction (Schegloff, 2007). Interactional trouble is a common aspect of ordinary conversation and of classroom instructional talk and simply cannot be avoided in classrooms with the numbers of potential interactants. This means that, at times, teachers need to intervene when turns overlap or multiple speakers at once create interactive trouble. Mostly teachers initiate talk that addresses trouble, prompting students to repair the problem in order for intersubjective understandings to be maintained. In the next extract from Cameron’s classroom, metatalk is used to highlight trouble – to name and address it. Specifically shown is how a locally produced interactional move, “waiting for the quiet moment” is oriented to at the beginning of a group activity as a resource for dealing with instances of multiple speakers talking at once and what this means for conversation. Extract 2: Introducing and noticing the quiet moment 1 Tch: the focus of what we’re doing gang (0.2) is we’re 2 going to share our ideas (0.4) and what do we need 3 to wait for^ 4 (0.5) 6 Tch: what do we need to wait for when we’re sharing? 7 Hen: quiet moment? 8 Tch: yeah the quiet moment (0.4) 9 ((the book reading begins and continues for several minutes)) 10 Tch: there’s also a hidden message in there (0.4) see if you 11 can pick it he hates being disturbed I know but this 12 is serious (0.4) that’s true said the animals= 13 Evi: =Mr Little (0.2) [what’s the animal’s name? 14     [((pointing to the book)) 15 Tch: that’s the weasel= 16 Ivy: =looks like a me::[erkat 17 Ron:        [I’ve seen a real meerkat at the zoo= 18 Arc: =I went [to the zoo 19 Ron:                             [that’s a duck 20 Tch: what are you noticing? 131

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21 Max: 22 Tch: 23 S1: 24 S2: 25 26 Tch:

both talking at the same time hard for us to hear isn’t it= =hard for us to understand he hasta stop talking (0.2) and °wait for the quiet moment° yep looks really confused

The teacher moves on in the lesson with his reading of the book and talk that orients students to aspects of the text (lines 10–12). Then Evie asks a question of the teacher to which he responds (lines 13–15). Next the talk of two other students, Ivy and Ronan, overlap (lines 16–17), Archer (line 18) interrupts and Ronan’s next turn (line 19) overlaps. In this case, the teacher’s question raises “noticing” (line 20), and Max responds with a formulation of what has just occurred in the previous talk by Ronan and Archer – they were both talking at the same time. Max thus names the interactional trouble that has prompted the teacher’s question and indicates that the boys’ talk has been noticed by him. The teacher and another student (S1) then elaborate on why this is a problem, and another student (S2) names the action that will repair the trouble (lines 24–25). Here it was evident that metatalk became a useful tool for Cameron and his students to address and manage interactional trouble. What is evident is that talk about dialogue becomes the object, and knowledge of it can be drawn upon by teachers and by students during the actual conduct of the lesson when trouble occurs. In this lesson, the teacher, in an explicit way, drew attention to interacting in the classroom and it was evident in the student’s responses that they were developing both an awareness and a language about dialogue that was able to be drawn upon in the flow of lesson exchanges or when that flow was threatened by trouble in the interaction.

Sharing responsibility for participating and managing Taking part in lessons means sharing responsibility for participating and managing turn-taking according to particular discursive moves negotiated and established in local classroom sites. This is evident in the next excerpt, when students in Stella’s K/1 class are discussing the story “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good,Very Bad Day” (1972). Extract 3: Having a turn and inviting others in 1 Reg: I agree with Floyd because he did because he stopped 2 traffic and then he fell down the hole 3 Tch: I like the way you used fell Reggie (.) because Floyd said 4 that he WENT down the hole but we are trying to get 5 away from using went aren’t we? so (0.2) I like the way 6 you’ve added onto that and said [fell down the hole 7 Gre: [Meg do you want to 8 have a go? 9 Meg: I agree with Reg because he falled down the [hole 10 Jon:       [Emma 11 Tch: thank you Meg= 12 Jon: =Emma would you like to have a go? 13 Emm: he was looking up in the air (.) and he wasn’t looking where 14 he was going= 132

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15 Tch: he was looking [up in the air 16 Flo:     [I think ( ) lots of different voices= 17 Tch: STOP (0.2) how many people can we having talking at 18 one time? 19 Sts: o::::ne 20 Tch: one (0.2) so at the moment we have got about four 21 four people trying to talk (0.3) I love the way people 22 invited Meg and Emma into the conversation and they 23 have actually been able to give us some information 24 (0.2) so well-done girls 25 Wil: Mrs A (0.2) I saw Mason invite Meg in 26 Jim: Mason would you like to have a go? 27 Mas: he falled down the hole and he gets some water and 28 then he jumped out 29 Tch: he jumped out (0.2) I like that= 30 Fin: =he wasn’t concentrating where he was going so he fell 31 down the hole (.) and then those people had a great idea 32 that they would fill the hole up with water (.) then he could 33 float This extract demonstrates interplay between participating, managing and sharing responsibility through talking about taking turns. Across the sequence, students are co-producing meanings about the text and at the same time managing the conversation producing a particular locally understood metatalk.This involves inviting others into the conversation, for example, Gretel (line 7) invites Meg into the conversation, Jon (lines 10 and 12) invites Emma to contribute, and Jim (line 26) invites Mason to take a turn. Meg, Emma and Mason each take up the student-initiated invitation, and it is both the teacher (lines 21–23) and student Will (line 25) who recognise and evaluate this participatory move. It is notable that when order breaks down, as it often does in conversations, it is Floyd (line 16) who draws attention to “lots of different voices”; it is then the teacher (lines 17–18) who makes the move to re-establish the one-speaker-at-a-time rule (Schegloff, 2007). This reinforces the interactional need for ‘hearablity’ in dialogue. Talk about the dialogic practices here forms productive talk moves that indicate ways that students with their teacher, Stella, share the responsibility for producing a meaningful discussion about the book. The previous extracts show sequences of interaction that demonstrate the interplay between knowing about and doing metatalk, but more interestingly teachers and students share in the responsibility for producing it. Specifically, these extracts show the ways that students, in particular, are able to do this because what counts as effective talk has been made apparent to them.

Student–student talk about dialogue Throughout the initial terms of the school year it became increasingly common for lessons in these early years classrooms to conclude with a brief discussion on dialogue. This connected to different characteristics of participating, understanding and managing the classroom discourse students were both encountering and producing. What this means is that for teachers like Stella and Cameron, the virtue of creating a communicative space for a dedicated focus on talk about dialogue was made apparent by its presence in lessons. For example, several weeks after Extract 3 133

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(previous), Stella and her young Kindergarten/Year 1 students were focusing their attention on turn-taking and how taking turns, stopping and waiting were important for “doing a conversation”. Extract 4: Taking turns, stopping and waiting 1 St1: like today when we were doing the mouse book (0.2) we 2 were doing a conversation (0.2) so everyone could have a 3 turn of doing it 4 Tch: and did everyone have a turn at having a conversation 5 today? 6 Sts: ye::::s 7 Tch: how did that work? 8 St2: because we went (0.2) like three or two people were 9 talking (0.2) we (0.3) two people or one person stopped 10 (0.2) so the other person could talk 11 St3: yeah (0.2) because it’s important that other people get a 12 turn= 13 Max: =so they get another chance of talking 14 Tch: and why Max is it important for everyone to be able to have 15 a go at talking? 16 Max: because (0.2) so they know what we’re talking [about 17 Meg:    [and you 18 can listen to them (0.2) their ideas 19 Max: I know (0.2) hear our question 20 Ell: I agree with Meg (0.2) you need to listen and wait for 21 your turn (0.2) to [add on 22 Meg:      [then you can learn 23 Flo: and [so 24 St4:    [so they get another change of talking= 25 Sts: =take your turn 26 Flo: so (0.2) like if other people did like twelve or fifteen talks 27 that means they’re talking too much (0.2) and the other= 28 Arc: =that means they’re not letting other people get a chance 29 to talk (0.3) like Viola was talking too much and she didn’t 30 let (0.2) she pushed in when I was talking (.) that’s not 31 letting other people have a chance 32 Nat: we gotta look at [them to listen= 33 St6:    [eye con[tact 34 St7:    [when people don’t listen (.) 35 that means they’re not doing the conversation (0.2) 36 because they’re not doing it= 37 Nat: =and wait your turn (0.2) because it’s rude As this exchange unfolded, students not only provided talk about their talk and interactions in classroom conversations but distributed across their turns was evidence of knowing and articulating but also managing and evaluating participation. For example, in their turns, Floyd (lines 26–27) and Archer (lines 28–31) produce self-evaluative metatalk (Newman, 2017) by monitoring and evaluating theirs and the turns of their interlocutors. Students also oriented to

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instances of managing when describing “doing a conversation”. For example, in lines 8–10, the student, in stating that when “like three or two people were talking (0.2) we (0.3) two people or one person stopped (0.2) so the other person could talk”, raised the matter of managing instances where multiple students began talking at once. This turn shaped the next turn responses from other students (lines 11 and 13) to add on to the idea with reasons why get[ting] a turn (line 11), getting another chance of talking (line 11, 14) connected to listening and waiting for your turn to add on (lines 18–19). These turns highlight important features of metatalk where the simultaneous production of evidentiary talk is produced in “doing the conversation”. This is noticed where several times across the exchange the use of the word “because” signalled reasoning (see e.g. lines 8, 11, 16, 36). What is striking in this sequence is that many students not only oriented to managing talk about “doing a conversation”, but they also displayed managing when issues of multiple starters (for instance) in practice emerged. For example, in the discussion where students spoke about the need for stopping and waiting for your turn, there were displays of stopping and waiting for a turn in the flow of practice (see Max and Meg lines 16–19 and the sequence of turns from lines 20–24, 32–35). That is, it became witnessable (present and hearable). It is notable in these transcripts that five- and six-year-old students are talking about not putting hands up to be nominated for a turn (because they can take turns with each other talking when doing a conversation). They are talking about the need to let other people have a turn to speak, looking at each other’s faces when talking, questioning, adding on to other people’s questions, saying what you think, adding on to other people’s ideas, agreeing and disagreeing and monitoring turns. Importantly, these ideas formed a common language for these students (after only two months of schooling) that provided the grounds upon which their shared understandings about talk and interaction were both produced and distributed among them as they were talking and interacting with one another. It is made salient in the doing of conversations.

Metatalk in dialogic classroom – The evidence and its implications for a dialogic turn Establishing metatalk in a dialogic classroom requires a shift in teacher and student practices. Specifically, as our data showed, if classroom interaction is to change then students need to be powerful participants in that change. Simply put, changing teacher talk is not sufficient in itself to bring about more dialogic spaces. Students can and must be informed change agents in the process. Emphasised is the need for an overall shift from teachers focusing only on their own talk and the dominance of the IRF in it (for example), to a concern for enhanced student talk encompassing students’ own understandings of classroom talk (Edwards-Groves & Davidson, 2017). This is necessary so that students are placed in a more powerful position to contribute to classroom dialogue and to the change process itself. Findings raise the matter of metatalk for students – in talking about dialogue, having a shared language to do that and in having opportunities to draw upon interactional practices that have been developed and used effectively in their classrooms.Talk and interaction must be heightened as being everyone’s business, with both teachers and students looking out for, and drawing upon, interactional moves that they can notice, name and produce. Metatalk enables lessons to occur in recognisable ways and to be drawn upon and monitored during the production of lessons. For a sustained dialogic turn, it is necessary that metatalk from the early years of schooling establishes a strong foundation from which to build a shared responsibility for coordinating, managing and contributing to lesson talk. Enabling students to expand their interactional repertoire

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leads to competencies that open up the dialogue space in lessons to give greater responsibility to young students for understanding, participating, managing and sharing the responsibility for their interactional conduct. Metatalk both explains it and becomes a resource that enables it.

Acknowledgements The project, Researching dialogic pedagogies for literacy learning across the primary years, was funded by the Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA). Ethical approval was given by Charles Sturt University (2015/257).

Appendix A: Key to Jefferson notation symbols The following transcription symbols used in the transcripts have been adapted from Jefferson’s notation system. Atkinson, J. M. & Heritage, J. (1984). Jefferson’s transcript notation. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. ix-xvi). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[[ Indicates where participants begin speaking simultaneously [ Indicates where participants’ speech overlaps ] Indicates where participants’ overlapping speech finishes = Indicates where participants’ speech follows on from each other without a break, latched (.) Indicates a micro interval during participants’ speech (0.1) Indicates the length of a participant’s pause (in approximate seconds) :: Indicates a prolonged sound in a word (i.e.) scho::ol - Indicates where a word is cut off (i.e.) sch> < Indicates that speech inside the symbols is said by a participant at a faster rate than the surrounding speech ? Indicates where a participant asks a question ! Indicates excitement in a participant’s speech “ ” Indicates where a participant has repeated a previous conversation ↑ Indicates where the intonation in a participant’s speech rises ↓ Indicates where the intonation in a participant’s speech falls SCH Uppercase words indicate that the participant’s speech is loud (often represents reading) Sch Underlining indicates emphasis on a syllable or word ° ° Indicates that speech inside the symbols is spoken softly (i.e.) °school° .hhh Indicates a participant’s audible inhalation hhh Indicates a participant’s audible exhalation (h) Indicates breathiness in participants’ responses, that could be laughter (( )) Provides a description of the verbal and non-verbal actions of participants ( ) Indicates where a participant’s speech could not be heard (~) Indicates the rise and fall of intonation in melodious speech (like singing)

Notes 1 A fuller description of the findings of the study is presented in: Edwards-Groves, C. & Davidson, C. (2017a). Becoming a Meaning Maker:Talk and Interaction in the Dialogic Classroom. Sydney: Primary English Teaching Association Australia.

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Metatalk for a dialogic turn 2 In Australia, students generally enter their first year of formal schooling aged between five and six years (noting that different state jurisdictions name this year Kindergarten, Reception or Preparatory). 3 All names anonymised; pseudonyms used throughout.

References Alexander, R. (2004). Still no pedagogy? Principle, pragmatism and compliance in primary education. Cambridge Journal of Education, 34(1), 7–33. Alexander, R. J. (2006). Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk (3rd edn). Cambridge: Dialogos. Anderson, N., Chapin, S. & O’Connor, C. (2011). Classroom Discussions: Seeing Math Discourse in Action. Sausalito, CA: Scholastic Math Solutions. Barnes, D. (1976). From Communication to Curriculum. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Barnes, D., & Todd, F. (1977). Communication and learning in small groups. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Britton, J. (1970). Language and Learning. Miami, FL: University of Miami Press. Cazden, C. (1972). Child Language and Education. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Cazden, C. B. (1988). Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Edwards, A. D., & Westgate, D. P. G. (1987). Investigating Classroom Talk. London: Falmer Press. Edwards-Groves, C. (2003). On Task: Focused Literacy Learning. Sydney: Primary English Teaching Association. Edwards-Groves, C., Anstey, M. & Bull, G. (2014). Classroom Talk: Understanding Dialogue, Pedagogy and Practice. Sydney: Primary English Teaching Association Australia. Edwards-Groves, C. & Davidson, C. (2017a). Becoming a Meaning Maker: Talk and Interaction in the Dialogic Classroom. Sydney: Primary English Teaching Association Australia. Edwards-Groves, C. & Davidson, C. (2017b). Accomplishing dialogic change in primary classrooms through critical participatory action research. In Participation and Democratization of Knowledge: New Convergences for Reconciliation 2017 ARNA Conference Proceedings, Cartegena, Colombia, June 2017. http://arnawebsite.org/conferences/cartegena-colombia-2017/ Flanders, N. A. (1970). Analyzing teaching behaviour. Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. Freiberg, J. & Freebody, P. (1995). Analysing literacy events in classrooms and homes: Conversation-analytic approaches. In P. Freebody & C. Ludwig (Eds.), Everyday Literacy Practices in and Out of Schools in Low Socio-Economic Urban Communities (pp. 185–372). Brisbane: Griffith University. French, P. & MacLure, M. (1981). Teachers’ questions, pupils’ answers: An investigation of questions and answers in the infant classroom. First Language, 2(4), 31–45. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame Analysis. New York: Harper & Row. Gumperz, J. & Hymes, D. (Eds.) (1972). Directions in Sociolinguistics. New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston. Heap, J. L. (1985). Discourse in the production of classroom knowledge: Reading lessons. Curriculum Inquiry, 15, 245–279. Howe, C., & Abedin, M. (2013). Classroom dialogue: A systematic review across four decades of research. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43, 325–356. Kemmis, S. & Edwards-Groves, C. (2018). Understanding Education: History, Politics and Practices. Singapore: Springer. Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R. & Nixon, R. (2014). The Action Research Planner: Doing Critical Participatory Action Research. Singapore: Springer. Labov, W. (1972). The transformation of experience in narrative syntax. In W. Labov (Ed.), Language in the Inner City. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mehan, H. (1979). Learning Lessons: Social Organisation in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mercer, N., & Dawes, L. (2008).The value of exploratory talk. N. Mercer & S. Hodgkinson (Eds.), Exploring talk in schools (pp. 55–71). London: SAGE. Mercer, N. & Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking: A Socio-Cultural Approach. London: Routledge. Michaels, S., O’Connor, C. & Resnick, L. B. (2008). Deliberative discourse idealized and realized: Accountable talk in the classroom and in civic life. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27(4), 283–297 Myhill, D. & Newman, R. (2016). Metatalk: Enabling metalinguistic discussion about writing. International Journal of Educational Research, 80, 177–187. Newman, R. M. C. (2016). Working talk: Developing a framework for the teaching of collaborative talk. Research Papers in Education, 31(1), 107–131.

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Edwards-Groves and Davidson Newman, R. M. C. (2017). Engaging talk: One teacher’s scaffolding of collaborative talk. Language and Education, 31(2), 130–151. Schegloff, E. (2007). Sequence Organization in Interaction:A Primer in Conversation Analysis, (Vol. 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schiffrin, D. (1980). Meta-talk: Organizational and evaluative brackets in discourse. Sociological Inquiry, 50(3–4), 199–236. Schleppegrell, M. J. (2013). The role of metalanguage in supporting academic language development. Language Learning: A Journal of Research in Language Studies, 63(1), 153–170. Skidmore, D. (2006). Pedagogy and dialogue. Cambridge Journal of Education, 36(4), 503–514. Sinclair, J. & Coulthard, M. (1975). Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The Language of Teachers and Pupils. London: Oxford University Press. Swain, M. (1998). Focus on form through conscious reflection. C. Doughty & J. Williams (Eds.), Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition (pp. 64–81). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swain, M., & Lapkin, S. (1998). Interaction and second language learning: Two adolescent French immersion students working together. The Modern Language Journal, 82, 320–337. Wells, G. (1981). Learning Through Interaction: The Study of Language Development. London: Cambridge University Press. Willes, M. J. (1983). Children into Pupils: A Study of Language in Early Schooling. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Zimmerman, D. (1978). Ethnomethodology. American Sociologist, 13(1), 6–15.

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10 EMBEDDING A DIALOGIC PEDAGOGY IN THE CLASSROOM What is the research telling us? Frank Hardman

Introduction Promoting a pedagogy that allows students to become more adept at using spoken and written language, so they can express their thoughts, engage with others in joint intellectual activity and advance their individual capacity for productive, rational and reflective thinking, is seen as a major goal of education (Hardman & Hardman, 2017a).Within classrooms, students can develop their proficiency in the use of spoken language through teacher–student and student–student interactions. The first involves teachers’ use of spoken interaction with students as a means for promoting guided participation and the development of student knowledge and understanding by providing the intellectual support of a relative ‘expert’ engaging with a ‘novice’ in a given learning task.The second involves peer group interaction and dialogue as a means of promoting learning by providing a more symmetrical environment for the co-construction of knowledge in which the power and status differentials between expert and novice are less likely to apply. While the origins of a dialogic pedagogy can be traced back thousands of years to the dialogues of, for example, Socrates and Confucius, the systematic researching and theorising of classroom talk is said to go back just over a hundred years (Hardman & Hardman, 2017b). Over the past four decades there has been an increasing emphasis on researching and promoting the implementation of dialogic pedagogy in the classroom (Howe & Abedin, 2013). With the growing body of research into a dialogic pedagogy has come a range of terms for describing the pedagogical approaches (Hang Khong, Saito & Gillies, 2017). Some studies have focused on student–student interactions using paired and group-based arrangement and labelling them as ‘exploratory talk’ (Barnes & Todd, 1995), ‘reciprocal teaching’ (Brown & Palincsar, 1989) and ‘dialogic interactions’ (Gillies, 2016). Others have focused on teacher–student interaction using terms such as ‘instructional conversation’ (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988), ‘dialogic inquiry’ (Wells, 1999), ‘philosophy for children’ (Topping & Tricky, 2015), ‘accountable talk’ (Michaels & O’Connor, 2015) and ‘dialogic teaching’ (Alexander, 2016). Despite differences in terminology and emphasis, all draw upon common features of classroom talk including greater student involvement, open exchanges of ideas, joint inquiry and construction of knowledge, multiple voices and respectful classroom relations (Haneda, 2017; Littleton & Mercer, 2013). Despite the growing body of evidence showing that a dialogic pedagogy can 139

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improve student learning outcomes and social-emotional well-being, research into its implementation suggests it raises many challenges that need to be overcome if it is to be successfully embedded in the classroom (Davies, Kiemer & Meissel, 2017; Howe & Mercer, 2017;Wilkinson et al., 2017). This chapter will look briefly at the research approaches that have been used to study classroom talk since the start of the 20th century before going on to consider how a greater focus on implementing a dialogic pedagogy has emerged since the start of the 21st century. It will then go on to consider what the research is telling about the kinds of professional conditions needed for teachers if they are to successfully implement a dialogic pedagogy in the classroom. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of the research findings for policy makers and practitioners in embedding and scaling up a dialogic pedagogy at the school and system level.

Research into classroom talk through observation The use of systematic observation to research classroom talk is said to date back to the early 20th century (see Hardman and Hardman [2017b] for a more comprehensive overview). The first study of teacher questioning was published in the USA in 1912 (Stevens, 1912). In the study, Stevens reported that teachers in elementary school asked most of the questions with 65 per cent being designed to make students recall textbook knowledge, resulting in students asking few of their own questions. Two years later, observers noted students’ participation in teacherled recitations by marking a seating chart with small circles for each request to recite and small squares for each response to the request (Horn, 1914). The popularity of systematic observation continued through the 1920s and 1930s. For example, Barr (1929) studied the relationship between teaching behaviours and their effectiveness as determined by learning outcomes. Barr’s observational data included counts of motivating behaviours (e.g. nods of approval) and types of teacher questions (e.g. recall of facts, real judgments). By the 1940s, such studies were adopting what became known as a process-product approach in which counts of verbal and non-verbal behaviours were correlated with outcome measures. For example, in 1949 Withall published a landmark systematic observation study entitled ‘The Development of a Technique for the Measurement of Social-Emotional Climate in Classrooms’ (Withall & Lewis, 1963). In his study, he argued that the social-emotional climate in the classroom was an outcome determined by the teacher’s verbal behaviour. From its inception, systematic observation has usually involved observers working in the natural setting of the classroom and allocating observed verbal and non-verbal behaviours to a set of previously specified categories, allowing for quantification and subsequent statistical analysis of the coded data. One of the best-known systems emerging from this research was Flanders’ Interaction Analysis system, which used a matrix that allowed for multiple coding using ten categories of behaviours for capturing the interaction sequences of a lesson (Flanders, 1970). Whatever happened in a three-second interval was classed as an event and coded immediately. It was this sequencing of classroom interactions that made Flanders’ system so popular in educational research so that systematic observation flourished from the 1960s onwards. Out of Flanders’ systematic observations of elementary and junior high school classes in the USA there developed the ‘two-thirds’ rule: about two-thirds of classroom time is devoted to talking; about two-thirds of this time the person talking is the teacher; and, two-thirds of teacher talk is made up of questions and monologue. In the UK, from the 1970s onwards, systematic observation was increasingly being used in primary schools to study patterns of classroom interaction. For example, the five-year Observational Research and Classroom Learning Evaluation (ORACLE) project found that Flanders’ two-thirds rule was loosely being played out in English primary schools (Galton, 1987). 140

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Twenty years on Maurice Galton and his colleagues replicated the 1976 ORACLE study and found the two-thirds of teacher talk had increased to three-quarters, largely consisting of teachers talking at students through statements, and factual and closed questions, but not talking with them by asking open questions and building on their answers (Galton, Hargreaves, Comber,Wall & Pell, 1999). Similarly, in studies conducted by Alexander over a four-year period, most of the questions asked by teachers were of a low cognitive level, requiring one- or two-word responses, and many were rhetorical (Alexander, Willcocks & Nelson, 1996). There were very few cases in which students initiated the questioning. Overall, despite the apparent increase in teacher talk, the research suggested the patterning of teacher talk at the level of questions and statements has remained relatively stable across the two decades.

Sociocultural, linguistic and ethnographic approaches to studying classroom talk During the 1990s, however, the popularity of systematic observation in researching classrooms started to decline.This was largely due to the development of sociocultural research and linguistic and ethnographic approaches to researching classroom practices (Edwards & Westgate, 1994). Such research drew upon the work of sociocultural theorists such as Vygotsky whose work, originally published in Russia in the 1920s and 1930s, was drawn to the attention of scholars in Europe and America when it became available in translation (Vygotsky, 1962).Vygotsky stressed the fundamental role that social interaction plays in the development of cognition and argued that cognitive processes interact with social and cultural practices. From the sociocultural perspective, knowledge and meaning are ‘co-constructed’ and language plays a central mediating role in the activity. Therefore, the sociocultural view of learning posits that enabling students to become more adept at using language through social interaction needs to be a central goal of education (Littleton & Mercer, 2013). One of the most important ways of working on this understanding was through talk, particularly where students were given the opportunity to assume greater control over their own learning by initiating ideas and being asked to elaborate on their thinking and that of other students. The sociocultural theory of learning was also informed by work of educational linguistics in the 1970s who were researching the patterning of teacher–student interaction. For example, Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) first identified that teaching exchanges typically consist of three moves: an initiation, usually in the form of a teacher question, a response in which a student attempts to answer the question, and a follow-up move, in which the teacher provides some form of feedback, which became abbreviated as the IRF. Similarly, in a subsequent study carried out in the USA, Mehan (1979) used ‘evaluate’ to designate the third move of the three-part exchange as it was often used to provide an evaluation of a student’s answer (abbreviated as IRE).1 Alongside such empirical developments, it was increasingly being recognised that studying and understanding classroom processes presented considerable theoretical and practical challenges and that categorical coding schemes by themselves often ignored the historical, institutional and cultural context within which education operates. Such shifts in approaches were also being assisted by the development of computer-based software for observing classrooms and for conducting quantitative corpus data analysis of spoken and written texts at both a micro and macro level. Such software offered a powerful tool for sorting, storing, organising and systematically analysing large sets of classroom data. The computerised systems enabled researchers to observe lessons in real-time and through retrospective analysis of video-recorded lessons; they were much quicker than traditional paper-and-pencil methods because the data were instantly stored and therefore available for immediate analysis. 141

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Researchers were also increasingly making use of mixed-method approaches drawing on both quantitative and qualitative methods to study classroom talk (Mercer, 2010). Linguistic ethnographic approaches which study how social and communicative processes operate in a range of settings and contexts and conversation analysis approaches which study social interaction and talk-in-interaction occur in naturalistic interactions have increasingly drawn on samples from large computerised corpus data sets. As a result, they are increasingly being used to reveal in greater depth how language and social life are mutually shaping. For example, research by Lefstein and Snell (2014) enabled a more nuanced interpretation of teacher pacing in lessons by combining micro-analysis of lesson transcripts with computerassisted systematic observation to focus on whole-class teaching. It demonstrated how systematic observation and micro-ethnographic approaches could be combined leading to the generation and testing of hypotheses and more generalisable findings while maintaining qualitative and ethnographic insights. Similarly, drawing on the field of conversational analysis, Seedhouse (2005) explored the relationship between pedagogy and interaction in English-as-a-second-language classrooms, focusing on the interaction and the organisation of turn-taking and the sequence and the repair in teacher–student and student–to-student interaction. Using these conversational markers, Seedhouse found that classroom talk took on a more conversational quality when the pedagogic agenda of the teacher was interrupted.

Persistence of the IRF/E structure in whole-class teaching International research into classroom interaction and discourse suggests the IRF/E structure is a universal feature of classroom talk across all levels of education from primary school through to higher education (see, for example, Alexander, 2001; Cazden, 2001; Hardman & Abd-Kadir, 2010). It found IRF/E exchanges to be particularly prevalent in directive forms of teaching and to often consist of closed teacher questions, brief student answers, superficial praise or criticism, rather than diagnostic feedback, and an emphasis on recalling information rather than genuine exploration. Using a computerised systematic observation system to analyse 156 live and video-recorded literacy and numeracy lessons introduced as part of national primary school reforms, Smith, Hardman, Wall & Mro’z (2004) found that teacher-led recitation dominated the classroom talk despite the stated intention of the strategies to introduce ‘interactive whole-class teaching’.2 Open questions (designed to elicit more than one answer) made up just 10 per cent of the questioning exchanges and 15 per cent of teachers did not ask any such questions. Probing by the teacher, where the teacher stayed with the same student to ask further questions to encourage sustained and extended dialogue, occurred in just over 11 per cent of the questioning exchanges. Uptake questions (building a student’s answer into a subsequent question) occurred in only 4 per cent of the teaching exchanges, and 43 per cent of the teachers did not use any such moves. Only rarely were teacher questions used to ask for student elaboration, argumentation and reasoning. As a result, most of the student exchanges were very short, lasting on average 5 seconds, and were limited to three words or fewer for 70 per cent of the time. Such findings were replicated in subsequent studies of the national literacy and numeracy strategies in England (Hardman, Smith & Wall, 2003, 2005; Smith, Hardman & Higgins, 2006). Compared to earlier studies of English primary classrooms, as revealed, for example, by the ORACLE studies, the findings suggested that traditional patterns of whole-class teaching had not been dramatically transformed by the national literacy and numeracy strategies. The findings from primary schools in England were similar to those emerging from a computerised analysis of teacher–student discourse moves of more than 200 video-recorded eighth142

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and ninth-grade English and social studies lessons in a variety of schools in the Midwest of America (Applebee, Langer, Nystand & Gamoran, 2003; Nystrand, Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser & Long, 2003). One of the aims of the research was to identify changes over time in the patterning of the classroom discourse with a particular focus on the use of ‘dialogic episodes’ leading to greater student participation. Nystrand et al. found that whole-class discussion in which there is an open exchange of ideas averaged less than 50 seconds in the eighth grade and less than 15 seconds in the ninth grade. Using markers of interactive discourse to encourage more reciprocal forms of teaching such as open-ended questions, uptake questions, student questions, cognitive level and level of evaluation, it was found that shifts from recitational to more interactive patterns of discourse were rare: in the 1,151 instructional episodes that they have observed (i.e. when a teacher moves on to a new topic) only 66 episodes (6.69 per cent) could be described as dialogic in nature.

Extending the IRF/E exchange to promote a dialogic pedagogy Despite the dominance of the IRF/E exchange structure found in whole-class teaching in education settings around the world, research suggests that the IRF/E exchange can be opened up to create more space for student engagement and participation in the classroom talk. In an attempt to open up classroom talk, research focused on the use of ‘higher-order’ questioning techniques to initiate student reflection, self-examination and enquiry.The techniques included, for example, the use of ‘open’ questions to invite students to speculate, hypothesise, reason, evaluate and consider a range of possible answers (Wragg, 1999). A range of alternatives to teacher questions was also suggested which included the use of provocative, open-ended statements by teachers, encouraging students to ask their own questions and maintaining silence so students have thinking time before they respond (Dillon, 1994; Edwards, 1992). Other research studies suggested that the IRF/E structure could take on a variety of forms and functions leading to different levels of student participation and engagement, particularly through the use of the follow-up moves. For example, Nystrand, Gamoran, Kachur and Prendergast (1997) advocated that teachers pay more attention to the way in which they evaluate student responses to promote ‘high-level evaluation’ where they incorporate student answers into subsequent questions. In this process, which they termed uptake, they suggested that teacher questions should be shaped by what immediately precedes them so that they are genuine questions. When such high-level evaluation occurred, the teacher was said to ratify the importance of a student response and allow it to modify or affect the course of the discussion in some way, weaving it into the fabric of an unfolding exchange. Nassaji and Wells (2000) also suggested that through feedback which went beyond evaluation of a student answer, teachers could extend the answer to draw out its significance so as to create a greater equality of participation for the students. They advocated that teachers use comments and probing questions to open up the F-move (i.e. feedback) so as to invite further student elaboration and create a more equal mode of participation. Such moves were said to create more extended teaching exchanges and a greater thematic coherence in the discourse. Similarly, Molinari, Mameli and Gnisci, using computerised corpus data software together with an analysis of micro-transitions occurring within IRF/E exchanges in Italian primary school lessons, found that while IRF/E sequences were a pervasive linguistic feature of classroom discourse, the use of open questions often led to more dialogic exchanges between teachers and students (2013). Open questions were often followed by complex answers and the re-initiation of the same question to different students. Teacher follow-up to student contributions was therefore found to be a key factor in extending the teaching exchanges. 143

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Where teachers accepted or rejected an answer the sequence was often short, but in cases where the teacher followed up to help the student elaborate or reformulate the answer the exchanges became more extended and dialogic in nature. Research by Michaels and O’Connor (2015) into primary science in the USA also identified a number of talk moves that have been found to be academically productive by opening up the third move in the IRF/E exchange to promote student justification and reasoning. For example, some of the moves prompted students to share and expand upon their ideas (e.g. ‘Can you say more about that?’); others helped them listen carefully to other students (e.g. ‘What do you think of what X has just said?’). Others helped students to dig deeper into their thinking as they provided evidence to support their claims (e.g. ‘Why do you say that? What’s your evidence?’), and some helped students to think with the reasoning of others by building on, elaborating and improving the thinking of the group (e.g. ‘Who can add to what X has just said?’). Together with clear ground rules for class and group discussion, the ‘accountable talk approach’ aimed to establish a culture of respectful and productive talk in the primary science classroom by getting students to elaborate on their thinking.

The impact of a dialogic pedagogy on student learning outcomes Moves towards systematically implementing a dialogic pedagogy in the classroom have increasingly been supported by a growing body of evidence showing significant learning gains for students (see also chapters by Alexander, Howe, Hennessy and Mercer, Chapters 47 and 13, respectively, in this volume). Studies using observational, correlational and experimental designs have identified common patterns of classroom interaction and discourse and found that students who experienced a dialogic pedagogy in the classroom demonstrated higher learning outcomes and more positive attitudes to schooling (Resnick, Aterhan & Clarke, 2015). Hattie (2009) conducted a synthesis of 800 meta-analyses involving over 50,000 experimental studies related to achievement in school-aged students with respect to interactive strategies, such as reciprocal teaching, collaborative group work and peer tutoring. He found that highquality classroom talk that can occur in teacher–student and student-to-student interaction enhances understanding, accelerates learning and raises learning outcomes and that such interactive approaches were also found to make the learning visible for both teachers and students allowing for more effective monitoring of learning and formative evaluation. In England, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) found that in independent experimental studies so far conducted, those which have been found to have had a large impact on learning outcomes in primary schools included a strong oral language component in the programme (e.g. Philosophy for Children, Oxford Primary Science and Dialogic Teaching) showing the importance of good quality classroom talk on student learning (EEF, 2018). For example, in an evaluation of the Philosophy for Children programme, it was found that students in intervention schools serving socio-economically deprived areas of England gained on average two months additional attainment on standardised tests of reading and mathematics compared to the control schools (Gorard, et al., 2015). Similarly, an independent evaluation of Alexander’s (2016) Dialogic Teaching approach designed to develop the repertoire of whole class teaching to include dialogue and discussion alongside rote, recitation, instruction and explanation, found that students in the intervention schools made on average two additional months’ progress in English and science, and one additional month’s progress in mathematics, compared to students in control schools. Students eligible for free school meals made two additional months’ progress in English, science and mathematics compared to free school meals children in control schools ( Jay et al., 2017; Alexander, 2018). 144

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The school-based professional development intervention was designed to run intensively over two school terms (20 weeks) and consisted of 11 cycles of training including induction, training and plenary workshops, directed reading activities, structured print materials, mentoring and video-based peer review and follow up to schools by the development team to monitor implementation and provide support to the mentors and teachers. Each school also appointed a mentor to support at least two Year 5 teachers in planning and reviewing their project-related activities. A key component of the programme was the guided planning, target setting and review of critical moments from lessons using video and audio equipment supplied by the programme development team. A detailed process evaluation of the implementation of the Dialogic Teaching programme by the development team combining computerised systematic observation of video recorded lessons with discourse analysis of lesson transcripts and interviews found that the intervention had impacted positively on teacher questioning and follow-up moves in which they probed and built on student responses/contributions (see Hardman, Chapter 11 in this volume). It also extended the length of student contributions in English, mathematics and science in the intervention teacher classes.

Developing and supporting a dialogic pedagogy in the classroom Studies looking at dimensions of teacher development suggest that because teaching is a complex activity in which moment-by-moment decisions are shaped by teacher beliefs and theories about what is effective teaching, theory and practice must be carefully integrated at the school and classroom level (Mercer & Howe, 2012; Wilkinson et al., 2017). In effective teacher professional development, theories of curriculum, effective teaching and assessment are developed alongside their application in the classroom. Such integration allows teachers to use their theoretical understandings as a basis for making ongoing, principled decisions about practice (Howe & Mercer, 2017). In order to address the challenges of implementing a dialogic pedagogy in the classroom, it is recognised within the teacher development and support literature that school-based professional development offers the best way of addressing the theory–practice gap by giving teachers a degree of ownership of the process of school improvement (Sedova, Sedlacek & Svaricek, 2016). Teachers need extended opportunities to think through new ideas and to try out new practices, ideally in a context where they get feedback from peers and expert practitioners. As will be discussed, observation, coaching and talk-analysis can provide useful tools for professional development. In this way, sympathetic discussion by groups of teachers of observational data derived from their own classrooms can act as an effective starting point for critical reflection within a cycle of lesson study. Challenging and changing beliefs and underlying pedagogical practices in order to implement a dialogic pedagogy in the classroom also requires the development of self-regulatory skills that enable teachers to monitor and reflect on the effectiveness of the changes they make to their classroom practice. Reflective cycles of professional learning have been shown to have a sizeable impact on student outcomes (Coe, Aloisi, Higgins & Elliot Major, 2014). Such change appears to be promoted by cycles of professional learning, often aided by video-stimulated reflective dialogue to encourage teachers to articulate and demonstrate their own understanding of their interactive styles and provide opportunities for monitoring and self-evaluation (Davies et al., 2017; Moyles, Hargreaves, Merry, Paterson & Esarte-Sarries, 2003; Saito & Khong, 2017). Observation/feedback routines structured explicitly as part of a continuous professional learning cycle and backed by the school leadership team and external support enable teachers to 145

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work on changing pedagogical practices to improve student outcomes (Borko, Jacobs, Eiteljorg & Pittman, 2008; Hennessy, Dragovic & Warwick, 2018; Muijs & Harris, 2006; Sedova, 2017). In order to support school-based teacher professional development, learning communities within and across schools have evolved as a way of encouraging teachers to monitor and report back on their teaching practices with peers (Ratts et al., 2015;Vescio, Ross & Adams, 2008). By working collectively at the school, cluster and district level, teachers can question and learn from each other to improve their practices. Such professional learning communities can also provide a formal structure for collaborative learning by involving a group of teachers working together to improve teaching and learning through ongoing critical reflection on pedagogical practices (Jensen, Sonnemann, Roberts-Hull & Hunter, 2016). It can also help to promote long-term cultural changes at the school, cluster and district level, with schools transforming themselves into learning communities (Fullan, Rincón-Gallardo & Hargreaves, 2015). Lesson study, involving collaborative planning, observation, analysis and refinement to improve lesson delivery and student learning, has emerged as a popular form of school-based professional development. Lesson study was first introduced into Japan in the early 1990s and involved teachers working with colleagues from a similar school year or grade level on a schoolwide theme. As part of the process, teachers would conduct peer observations and meet in groups to share their observations and critical reflections on the lessons over a three- to sixmonth period before the lessons were shared publicly. A systematic review concluded that lesson study is a powerful tool for helping teachers to critically reflect on their pedagogical practice and improve student learning outcomes (Dudley, 2014). It was found to increase collaboration and promote a greater willingness by teachers to take instructional risks leading to more interactive classroom activities, increased pedagogical content knowledge, improved student performance and a more collaborative and reflective school community. Lesson study is now used widely in Australia, Hong Kong (China), Singapore, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States (Cheung & Wong, 2014; Hird, Larson, Okubo & Uchino, 2014; Lewis, 2013; Perry & Lewis, 2013). ‘Learning rounds’ are also increasingly being used by teachers to conduct peer observation across year and subject groups within a school and the evidence collated to provide insights to teaching and learning approaches and their impact on student learning outcomes (Philpott & Oates, 2016). In Singapore, for example, each school has multiple professional learning teams to promote collaboration through action research, learning circles and lesson study, with an emphasis on student learning and critical reflection. Similarly, in Shanghai, China, teachers meet in weekly teaching-research groups to share teaching experiences and to conduct action research linked to their teaching (Hairon & Tan, 2017). Plans and achievements are also regularly shared with other schools through cluster meetings and at the district level.

Conclusions The chapter has presented a systematic view of the research approaches that have been used to study classroom talk and discusses the challenges for implementing a dialogic pedagogy as well as the potential benefits that may arise from promoting a dialogic pedagogy in the classroom. In conclusion, it will highlight the importance of developing and supporting teachers to theorise and study their own classroom practices in a supportive and collaborative environment and make suggestions for how policy makers, schools and researchers can support and inform such a collaborative endeavour. It has been argued in the preceding section that school-based professional development needs to be central to scaling up a dialogic pedagogy. It will also require a systemic approach to ensure 146

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alignment of policies, plans and institutional arrangements with regard to teacher education, curriculum reform and assessment practices. For example, in many education systems high-stakes testing is playing an increasingly important role in schools encouraging surface learning with many months being spent on test preparation, where directive instruction and drill and practice is the norm at the expense of a more dialogic pedagogy and deep learning (Resnick et al., 2018). Such test and accountability-driven educational systems using standardised assessments as a measure of quality have been criticised for producing superficial learning (as a result of high-pressure testing) and for failing to engage students by focusing too much on knowledge acquisition while neglecting other important aspects of schooling such as social and emotion wellbeing, citizenship, critical thinking and problem solving (Wrigley, Thomson & Lindgard, 2011). Teachers also need to be given the time to try out new approaches and to reflect and receive feedback on their efforts. A meta-analysis of experimental and quasi-experimental studies to evaluate the impact of sustained professional development (ranging from 30 to 100 hours spread over 6 to 12 months) on student achievement found that an average of 49 hours in a year boosted student achievement by approximately 21 percentile points (Yoon, Duncan, Lee, Scarloss & Shapley, 2007). Programmes that involved a limited amount of professional development (ranging from 5 to 14 hours in total) showed no statistically significant effect on student learning. Such findings support the view that teacher professional development needs to be sustained over time, focused on teaching subject content and embedded in the classroom. Many high achieving systems, like Finland, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and the Shanghai province of China, have provided teachers with the time needed to enable them to be involved in collaborative research and peer coaching at the classroom level so as to transform schools into learning organisations (OECD, 2016). Such systems are not driven by top-down reforms but by teachers embracing and leading on reform. In this way, high performing education systems provide opportunities for teachers to work together on issues of instructional planning, to learn from one another through mentoring or peer coaching and by conducting research on the outcomes of classroom practices to collectively guide curriculum, assessment and professional learning decisions. The high performing education systems also benefit from clear and concise profiles of what teachers are expected to know and be able to do at different stages of their careers so as to guide initial teacher education, induction and professional development and create a lifelong learning framework for teachers. The establishment of such benchmarks to assess progress in professional development over time means that appraisal and feedback are used in a supportive way to recognise and reward good performance (Darling-Hammond, Burns, Campbell, Goodwin & Low, 2018). Preparing young people for the 21st century will require teachers to be equipped with the pedagogic skills that allow for the teaching of life skills alongside literacy, numeracy and science through the use of a dialogic pedagogy. Students need to be educated as responsible global citizens by including issues such as environmental sustainability and promoting core values such as tolerance, appreciation of diversity and civic responsibility in the school curriculum. They also need to be engaged in problem solving, critical thinking and project-based activities in the classroom as a way of cultivating creativity, innovation and independent learning through teacher–student and peer–peer dialogue and discussion. Therefore, the embedding and scaling up of a dialogic pedagogy approach across all levels of an education system is essential. Finally, there is the need to build a more rigorous evidence base about the kinds of professional development approaches that help to build teacher capacity and bring about transformations in pedagogical practices and student learning. Longitudinal studies combining both impact and process evaluations investigating the scale-up of national reforms at a subject, grade and whole school level will help build a rigorous evidence base for policy makers, teacher educators and teachers on the sustainability, efficiency and cost effectiveness of school-based approaches. 147

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Notes 1 Henceforth, IRF/E will be used to discuss the three-part exchange structure 2 Since the late 1990s there had been a growing emphasis on addressing standards of literacy and numeracy in English primary schools. In a bid to raise standards, the national literacy and numeracy strategies were launched with an emphasis on direct, ‘interactive whole-class teaching’ to promote dialogue and discussion alongside teacher explanation and instruction (Reynolds & Farrell, 1996).

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Embedding a dialogic pedagogy Hairon, S. & Tan, C. (2017). Professional learning communities in Singapore and Shanghai: Implications for teacher collaboration. Compare, 47(1), 91–104. Haneda, M. (2017). Dialogic learning and teaching across diverse contexts: Promises and challenges. Language and Education, 31(1), 1–5. Hardman, F. & Abd-Kadir, J. (2010). Classroom discourse: Towards a dialogic pedagogy. In D. Wyse, R. Andrews & J. Hoffman (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of English, Language and Literacy Teaching (pp. 254–263). London: Routledge. Hardman, J. & Hardman, F. (2017a). Guided co-construction of classroom talk. In S. May, S. Wortham & D. Kim (Eds.), Encyclopaedia of Language and Education: Discourse and Education (3rd edn, pp. 199–210). The Netherlands: Springer. Hardman, F. & Hardman, J. (2017b). Observing and recording classroom processes. In D. Wyse, L. Suter, N. Selwyn & E. Smith (Eds.), British Education Research Association/SAGE Handbook of Educational Research (pp. 571–589). London: Sage. Hardman, F., Smith, F. &Wall, K. (2003). ‘Interactive’ whole class teaching in the National Literacy Strategy. Cambridge Journal of Education, 33(2), 197–215. Hardman, F., Smith, F. & Wall. K. (2005). Teacher-pupil dialogue with pupils with special needs in the National Literacy Strategy. Educational Review, 57(3), 299–316. Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. Abingdon: Routledge. Hennessy, S., Dragovic, T. & Warwick, P. (2018). A research-informed, school-based professional development workshop programme to promote dialogic teaching with interactive technologies. Professional Development in Education, 44(2), 145–168. Hird, M., Larson, R., Okubo,Y. & Uchino, K. (2014). Lesson study and lesson sharing: An appealing marriage. Creative Education, 5, 769–779. Horn, E. (1914). Distribution of opportunity for participation among the various pupils in classroom recitation. Teacher College Contributions to Education, 67. New York: Columbia University Howe, C. & Abedin, M. (2013). Classroom dialogue: A systematic review across four decades of research. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43(3), 325–356. Howe, C. & Mercer, N. (2017). Commentary on the papers. Language and Education, 31(1), 83–92. Jay, T., Willis, B., Thomas, P., Taylor, R., Moore, N., Burnett, C., Merchant, G., & Stevens, A. (2017). Dialogic Teaching: Evaluation Report and Executive Summary. London: Education Endowment Foundation. Jensen, B., Sonnemann, J., Roberts-Hull, K. & Hunter, A. (2016). Beyond PD:Teacher Professional Learning in High-Performing Systems. Washington, DC: National Center on Education and the Economy. Khong, T. D. H., Saito, E. & Gillies, M. (2017). Key issues in productive classroom talk and interventions. Educational Review. 1–16. Lefstein, A. & Snell, J. (2014). Better than Best Practice: Developing Teaching and Learning Through Dialogue. London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis. Lewis, C. (2013). How Do Japanese Teachers Improve Their Instruction? Synergies of Lesson Study at the School, District and National Levels.Washington, DC: Board of Science Education, National Academy of Sciences. Littleton, K. & Mercer, N. (2013). Interthinking: Putting Talk to Work. Abingdon: Routledge. Mehan, H. (1979). Learning Lessons: Social Organisation in the Classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Mercer, N. (2010). The analysis of classroom talk: Methods and methodologies. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 1–14. Mercer, N., & Howe, C. (2012). Explaining the dialogic processes of teaching and learning: The value of sociocultural theory. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 1(1), 12–21. Michaels, S. & O’Connor, C. (2015). Conceptualizing talk moves as tools: Professional development approaches for academically productive discussion. In L. B. Resnick, C. Asterhan & S. N. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Talk and Dialogue (pp. 347–361). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Molinari, L., Mameli, C. & Gnisci, A. (2013). A sequential analysis of classroom discourse in Italian primary schools. The many faces of the IRF pattern. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 83(3), 414–430. Moyles, J., Hargreaves, L., Merry, R., Paterson, F. & Esarte-Sarries,V. (2003). Interactive Teaching in the Primary School. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Muijs, D. & Harris, A. (2006). Teacher led school improvement: Teacher leadership in the UK. Teaching and Teacher Education, 22, 961–972. Nassaji, H. & Wells, G. (2000). What’s the use of ‘Triadic Dialogue’?: An investigation of teacher-student interaction. Applied Linguistics, 21(3), 376–406.

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Frank Hardman Nystrand, M., Gamoran, A., Kachur, R. & Prendergast, C. (1997). Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom. New York: Teacher College Press. Nystrand, M., Wu, L. L., Gamoran, A., Zeiser, S. & Long, D. A. (2003). Questions in time: Investigating the structure and dynamics of unfolding classroom discourse. Discourse Processes, 35(2), 135–198. OECD. (2016). Supporting Teacher Professionalism: Insights from TALIS 2013. Paris: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Perry, R. & Lewis, C. (2013). Improving the Mathematical Content Base of Lesson Study: Summary of Results. Washington, DC: Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education. Philpott, C. & Oates, C. (2016). Teacher agency and professional learning communities: What can learning rounds in Scotland teach us? Professional Development in Education, 43(3), 318–333. Ratts, R. F., Pate, J. L., Archibald, J. G., Andrews, S. P., Ballard, C. C. & Lowney, K. S. (2015). The influence of professional learning communities on student achievement in elementary schools. Journal of Education & Social Policy, 2(4), 51–61. Resnick, L., Asterhan, C. & Clarke, S. (Eds.). (2015). Socializing Intelligence Through Academically Productive Talk and Dialogue. Washington, DC: American Education Research Association. Resnick, L. B., Asterhan, C. S. C. & Clarke, S. with Schantz, F. (2018). Next generation research in dialogic teaching. In G. E. Hall, L. F. Quinn & D. M. Gollnick (Eds.), Wiley Handbook of Teaching and Learning (pp. 323–338). London: Wiley-Blackwell. Reynolds, D. & Farrell, S. (1996). Worlds Apart? A Review of International Surveys of Educational Achievement Involving England, Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) Reviews of Research. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Saito, E. & Khong, T. D. H. (2017). Not just for special occasions: Supporting the professional learning of teachers through critical reflection with audio-visual information. Reflective Practice, 18(6), 837–851. Sedova, K. (2017). A case study of a transition to dialogic teaching as a process of gradual change. Teaching and Teacher Education, 67, 278–290. Sedova, K., Sedlacek, M. & Svaricek, R. (2016).Teacher professional development as a means of transforming student classroom talk. Teaching and Teacher Education, 57, 14–25. Seedhouse, P. (2005). The Interactional Architecture of the Language Classroom: A Conversation Analysis Perspective. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Sinclair, J. & Coulthard, M. (1975). Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English Used by Teachers and Pupils. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, F., Hardman, F. & Higgins, S. (2006). The impact of interactive whiteboards on teacher-pupil interaction in the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies British Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 437–451. Smith, F., Hardman, F.,Wall, K. & Mroz, M. (2004). Interactive whole class teaching in the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies. British Educational Research Journal, 30(3), 403–419. Stevens, R. (1912). The question as a measure of efficiency in instruction: A critical study of classroom practice, Contributions to Education, (Vol. 48). 95. New York: Columbia University, Teachers College Press. Tharp, R. G. & Gallimore, R. (1988). Rousing Minds to Life:Teaching, Learning, and Schooling in Social Context. Cambridge: University Press Cambridge. Topping, K. J. & Trickey, S. (2015). The role of dialogue in philosophy for children. In L. Resnick, C. Asterhan & S. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 99–110). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Vescio, V., Ross, D. & Adams, A. (2008). A review of research on the impact of professional learning communities on teaching practice and student learning. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24, 80–91. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and Language (E. Hanfmann & G, Vakar, Eds., Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a Sociocultural Practice and Theory of Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilkinson, I. A. G., Reznitskaya, A., Bourdage, K., Oyler, J., Glina, M., Drewry, R., Kim, M.Y. & Nelson, K. (2017).Toward a more dialogic pedagogy: Changing teachers’ beliefs and practices through professional development in language arts classrooms. Language and Education, 31(1), 65–82. Withall, J. & Lewis, W. W. (1963). Social interaction in the classroom. In N. L. Gage (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching (pp. 683–714). New York: American Educational Research Association. Wragg, E. C. (1999). An Introduction to Classroom Observation (2nd edn). London: Routledge.

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Embedding a dialogic pedagogy Wrigley, T., Thomson, P. & Lindgard, R. (Eds.). (2011). Changing Schools: Alternative Ways to Make a World of Difference. London: Routledge. Yoon, K. S., Duncan, T., Lee, S. W. -Y., Scarloss, B. & Shapley, K. (2007). Reviewing the Evidence on How Teacher Professional Development Affects Student Achievement (Issues & Answers Report, REL 2007-No. 033).Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance.

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11 ANALYSING STUDENT TALK MOVES IN WHOLECLASS TEACHING Jan Hardman

Introduction Studying the quality of teacher–student and student-to-student interaction in whole-class and group-based talk has received increasing attention over the past 40 years because of its perceived role in improving pedagogical practices and student learning (Howe & Abedin, 2013; Resnick, Asterhan & Clarke, 2015). Drawing on the socio-cultural theory suggesting that mental processes interact with social and cultural practices and are mediated through talk, researchers have increasingly focused on identifying productive talk moves used by teachers and students that may result in higher levels of student engagement and learning by extending their thinking, argumentation and reasoning in teacher–student and student–student interaction (Mercer & Howe, 2012; Hardman & Hardman, 2017; Hennessy et al., 2016). Whether the emphasis has been on whole-class or group-based teaching, research into a dialogic pedagogy suggests there are common features of an active approach to student learning including greater involvement in the classroom talk, an open exchange of ideas, joint inquiry and construction of knowledge, multiple voices and respectful classroom relations (Haneda, 2017; Khong, Saito & Gillies, 2019; Littleton & Mercer, 2013). Despite the growing body of evidence showing that a dialogic pedagogy can improve student learning outcomes and social-emotional well-being, research into its implementation suggests teachers have found it difficult in practice and that it is rarely observed in the classroom (Davies, Kiemer & Meissel, 2017; Howe & Mercer, 2017; Wilkinson et al., 2017). The past research, particularly into whole-class talk, has also put a greater emphasis on researching teacher talk rather than the learning talk of the students as it is recognised that most class talk is teacher-fronted with teachers controlling the turn taking and that teachers need to made aware and supported in their attempts to create more space in the classroom talk for greater student participation. In this chapter, the role of student talk is highlighted as it is a key feature of a dialogic pedagogy. First, a brief review of the research into the types of student talk found in whole-class teaching is presented, followed by a discussion on how it is used to inform the design of the student talk analytical framework. Second, the analytical framework is applied to three cases of teacher–student classroom talk, consisting of mathematics, English and science classroom excerpts. It concludes with a discussion of how the framework could be used by teachers to inform their implementation of a dialogic approach in whole-class and group-based teaching to encourage levels of student engagement and thinking in order to advance their learning and understanding. 152

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Researching student talk in whole-class teaching Much of the research into whole-class talk has looked at student talk within the perceived limitations of what has become known as the ‘recitation script’.Teacher-led recitation is made up of teacher explanation and closed teacher questions, brief student answers and minimal feedback which requires students to report someone else’s thinking rather than think for themselves and to be evaluated on their compliance in doing so (see, for example, Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; Nystrand, Gamoran, Kachur & Prendergast, 1997).Work on the linguistic patterning of teacher– student interaction by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) first revealed the initiation–response–feedback (IRF) exchange which is central to teacher-led recitation. A similar pattern referred to as initiation–response–evaluation (IRE) was also developed by Mehan (1979) around the same time in the United States of America to reflect the fact that the third move in the triadic teaching exchange is often an evaluation of student response. In its prototypical form teacherled recitation consists of three moves: an initiation, usually in the form of a teacher question, a response in which a student attempts to answer the question, and a follow-up move, in which the teacher provides some form of feedback (very often in the form of a brief evaluation) to the student’s often brief response. While Sinclair and Coulthard found the follow-up to a student response was very often in the form of an evaluation as to its acceptability within the teacher’s frame of reference, teachers sometimes used comments which exemplified, expanded, justified or added additional information to a student response. They also identified a re-initiation move which was often directed to another student if the teacher did not get the ‘right’ answer, although it could be used as a probing move where a teacher stayed with the same student to bring him/her round to the required answer. Both moves were seen as leading to what Hoey (1993) later called a complex exchange extending across more than one IRF exchange. Building on the work of Sinclair and Coulthard, observational studies of teacher use of the IRF exchange in whole-class talk suggested it was largely being used in a restrictive way creating few opportunities for student participation as teacher presentation and closed question–answer sequences allowing for only one answer dominated most of the classroom talk. For example, in a study of video-recorded literacy and numeracy lessons (75 in total) using computerised systematic observation drawn from a national sample of 35 primary schools in England, it was found that open questions allowing for more than one answer made up 10 per cent of the questioning exchanges and 15 per cent of teachers did not ask any such questions. Probing by the teacher, whereby a teacher stayed with the same student and asked further questions to encourage an extended and reasoned answer occurred in just over 11 per cent of the questioning exchanges. Uptake questions, whereby a teacher built a student’s answer into a subsequent question, occurred in only 4 per cent of the teaching exchanges, and 43 per cent of teachers did not use such moves. Therefore, most of the student exchanges were very short, lasting on average 5 seconds, and were limited to three words or less for 70 per cent of the time and were given a simple evaluation ‘ok’, ‘yes’, ’fine’ and ‘good’ by the teacher (Smith, Hardman, Wall & Mroz, 2004). Similarly, in a study of dialogic episodes of whole-class discussion in 200 video-recorded eighth- and ninth-grade English and social studies lessons in a variety of schools in the Midwest of America, the analysis of discourse moves such as open-ended questions, uptake questions, student questions and level of teacher evaluation showed that an open exchange of ideas was rare. In grade eight it averaged less than 50 seconds and in grade 9 less than 15 seconds. Overall, in an analysis of 1,151 instructional episodes, marked by a shift in topic, only 66 episodes (6.69 per cent) could be described as being dialogic (Applebee, Langer, Nystand & Gamoran, 2003; 153

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Nystrand, Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser & Long, 2003). Therefore, these studies indicated that extending moves across more than one IRF exchange to open up space in the discourse for student contributions in whole-class talk were rare. They suggested the need for research into how the IRF exchange structure could be opened up to students.

Opening up the IRF exchange structure In an attempt to open up the IRF exchange structure to encourage greater student participation in whole-class talk, research has focused on teacher use of ‘higher-order’ questions to promote reflection, self-examination and enquiry through the use of ‘open’ questions which invite students to speculate, hypothesise, reason, evaluate and to consider a range of possible answers (Wragg, 1999). A range of alternatives to teacher questions was also explored which included the use of provocative, open-ended statements by teachers to encourage students to ask their own questions and the use of ‘wait time’ to allow students to formulate their answers (Dillon, 1994). Within whole-class teaching research started to explore how the F-move of the three-part exchange structure could be opened up to encourage greater student participation (Cullen, 2002; Hardman, 2008; Smith & Higgins, 2007). For example, researchers used computerised corpus data software and transcript analysis to analyse micro-transitions occurring within and across 828 triadic teaching exchanges captured in 12 third grade (age eight to nine years) primary classes from five urban primary schools located in northern Italy. They found that teacher open questions were often followed by complex answers which in turn encouraged teachers to follow up the student answers using high-level evaluation by probing for evidence and elaboration, asking other students to comment and by building the answer into subsequent questions (i.e. uptake questions) to create a thematic coherence across dialogic sequences (Molinari, Mameli & Gnisci, 2013). Similarly, building on the Italian sequential analysis of teaching exchanges, 73 upper primary literacy lessons taught by seven teachers based in a large primary school in east London were video-recorded and analysed (Lefstein, Snell & Israeli, 2015). From their intensive sequential analysis of over 7,000 discourse moves, Lefstein et al. found that while there was variation between teachers in their use of the talk moves, episodes in which teachers used a higher proportion of open, probing, uptake and repair questions generally promoted higher levels of elaboration and reasoning from the students. Research by Michaels and O’Connor (2015) into primary science in the USA using an approach known as ‘accountable talk’ has also identified some teacher-talk moves that have been found to be academically productive by opening up the third move in the IRF exchange to students. For example, some of the moves prompt students to share, expand and elaborate upon their ideas. Others help students to dig deeper into their reasoning by providing evidence to support their claims and to build on the reasoning of others in the class. In light of the greater focus on student talk discussed in this section, it has become apparent that there is a need for an analytical framework that adequately captures the types of talk moves used by students in response to the broader range of talk moves being used by teachers as part of a dialogic pedagogy, particularly in following up a student response.The framework discussed in the next section was devised as part of an impact and process evaluation of a professional development intervention design to promote a dialogic pedagogy in the teaching of primary English, mathematics and science in 78 primary schools serving socio-economically deprived areas in the cities of Birmingham, Bradford and Leeds (see Alexander and Hardman, Chapters 47 and 10, respectively, in this volume). The independent impact evaluation found that Year 5 154

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students (i.e. 9- and 10-year-olds) in the intervention schools made on average two additional months’ progress in English and science, and one additional month’s progress in mathematics, compared to students in control schools. Students eligible for free school meals made two additional months’ progress in English, science and mathematics compared to free school meals children in control schools (Jay et al., 2017). The school-based professional development intervention was designed to run intensively over 2 school terms (20 weeks) and consisted of 11 professional development cycles of training including induction, training and plenary workshops, directed reading activities, structured print materials, mentoring and video-based peer review and follow up to schools by the development team to monitor implementation and provide support to the mentors and teachers. Each school also appointed a mentor to support at least two Year 5 teachers in planning and reviewing their project-related activities. A key component of the programme, therefore, was the guided planning, target setting and review of critical moments from lessons using video and audio equipment supplied by the programme development team.

Analytical framework Sinclair and Coulthard’s (1975) original linguistically informed descriptive model of classroom talk showed that it is hierarchical in nature consisting of ranks comprising of an ‘act’ (at the lowest rank), ‘move’ (made up of one or more acts), ‘exchange’ (made up of one or more moves), ‘transaction’ (a series of exchanges) and ‘lesson’ (at the highest rank consisting of an unordered series of transactions). As discussed previously, their model typified a traditional primary lesson in England and the interaction under scrutiny is teacher-led and -dominated. The model at the rank of moves follows a strict structure of teacher (often closed/test) question, student (brief/ unelaborated) response and low-level teacher feedback/evaluation.The teacher feedback/evaluation move is retrospective in orientation; hence it cuts short the classroom interaction, and students’ opportunity to talk is curtailed. There is, therefore, a need to reconceptualise the recitation model of classroom discourse to best capture a dialogic pedagogy in which the teacher opens up space within and across IRF exchanges to allow for greater student participation in whole-class talk. The most appropriate place for extension of the IRF exchange is at the level of moves and acts as shown in Table 11.1 as it is in these ranks that much interactional activity between the teacher and students can occur as they allow, for example, a teacher to probe a student answer or invite other students to comment on a contribution. The reconceptualisation of the IRF exchange as part of a dialogic pedagogy involves extending the teacher re-initiation (i.e. Teacher Feedback [F] and Follow-up [F-up] Moves) move and the student response (R) move. Building on Sinclair and Coulthard’s (1975) model, the teacher R/I move can be expanded to include asking students for elaboration,

Table 11.1 Dialogic model of classroom discourse Lesson Transaction T Initiation Move (I)

S Response Move (R)

T Feedback Move (F)

T Follow-up Move (F-up)

S Response Move (R)

Act

Act

Act

Act

Act

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Student talk moves

Description

CSQ

Closed student question

Student asks a closed or procedural question

OSQ

Open student question Brief student contribution Extended student contribution

BSC ESC

Example (S = student)

S: Can we use diagrams? Like a Venn diagram? Student asks an open/authentic question S: How does blood make it grow? Student provides pre-specified, brief S: Congruent means information without any development identical Examples are Student provides non-specified information provided in and thinking. The contribution is developed Table 11.3 to some extent through, for example, explanation, expansion, evaluation, justification, argumentation and speculation

argumentation and reasoning through such questions as ‘why do you think so?’, ‘do you agree with … ?’, ‘what else have you got to add to that?’, ‘what do you mean by that?’, ‘does it always work that way?’, ‘what do others think of this answer?’ Research suggests such use of the R/I move by teachers often leads to an extended student contribution. In the light of the extended teacher re-initiation move, a coding system was designed to analyse an extended student R-move that followed either a teacher initiation question or teacher R/I question (see Table 11.2). While student R-moves comprise mainly of answers to teacher questions, when the teacher opens up the F-move it can lead to students elaborating on their thinking in the form of statements and questions that can be responded to by the teacher or another student. Student questions were sub-categorised into two: closed/procedural (CSQ) and open/authentic question (OSQ). Student contributions were coded in terms of brief student contribution (BSC) and extended student contribution (ESC). A brief student contribution provides pre-specified information without any elaboration expressed in a word, phrase or a simple answer. In contrast, an extended student contribution provides non-specified information and thinking that is developed to some extent through, for example, explanation, expansion, evaluation, justification, argumentation and speculation. In order to explore further the student R-moves, extended student contributions (ESC) were further divided into act types. Table 11.3 sets out 12 codes that give rise to dialogic episodes in the classroom. For example, students share and clarify information and thinking through expand/add, explain/analyse, connect and recount, listen carefully to one another to rephrase others’ contribution, deepen their reasoning and engage with others’ reasoning through argue, justify, evaluate, challenge, speculate and shift position and think creatively through imagine. These categorisations largely correspond with Michaels and O’Connor’s (2015) teacher talk moves which prompt students to share and expand upon their ideas, to provide evidence for their claims and to build on, elaborate and improve the thinking of the group. The sub-types of extended student contributions also reflect Alexander’s (2018) repertoire of learning talk consisting of narrating, explaining, instructing, questioning, building on answers, speculating/ imagining, exploring and evaluating ideas, discussing, arguing, reasoning and justifying, and negotiating. 156

Table 11.3 Coding framework for act types making up extended student contributions Code

Sub-types of extended student contributions

Description

Example (T = teacher; S = student)

SE/Add Student expand/add

Student says more by building on, adding to or extending own or another student’s contribution e.g. ‘You could also … ’, ‘I’d like to add … ’

S:You could also have quotes with people that have seen it [Bigfoot], like, the mountaineer and the local ranger.

SCon

Student connect

S: I’ve seen it in EastEnders. [a UK soap opera]

SE/Ana

Student explain/analyse

SRep

Student rephrase

SRec

Student recount

Student makes an intertextual reference to something else, e.g. a previous discussion, another text, event, experience or resource Student explains something in some detail or examines own or another student’s contribution (not to convince/persuade). Student repeats, reformulates or summarises own or another student’s contribution e.g. ‘I said’, ‘He said that … ’, ‘I mean … ’ Student gives an account of an event or experience.

SEval

Student evaluate

SArg

Student argue

S: Maybe an easier way to explain it would be maybe put the biggest, biggest part of the number in the furthest place where you have your column to the left.

S: Harvey said that like the things that are gonna be different is when you’re times-ing and multiplying and you … When you’re multiplying and dividing them you’re doing it by different numbers. S: He was driving, he was driving, and then saw a shiny object coming down from the sky. And then he went there … S: I think it’s like it’s quite awful to Student makes a say that like you wouldn’t say judgement. that when someone’s passed away e.g. ‘true’, ‘wrong’, ‘good’, ‘I because it’s a bit like … I would like that idea’, say mean or a bit awful. ‘In my opinion’, ‘happy with’. Student states a position/ S: I would disagree to use footage in a newspaper report because … opinion/argument e.g. ‘I think that … ’, ‘I (dis)agree’, ‘should’, ‘need’. (Continued )

Jan Hardman Table 11.3 Continued Code

Sub-types of extended student contributions

Description

Example (T = teacher; S = student)

SJus

Student justify

S: Because ice starts hard when it’s not melting, and then when it melts it turns into liquid.

SSpec

Student speculate

SImag

Student imagine

SChal

Student challenge

SSP

Student shift position

Student provides reasoning/evidence (to convince/persuade) e.g. ‘because’, ‘reason’, ‘so’. Student predicts/ hypothesises an idea or situation e.g. ‘maybe’, ‘might’, ‘if ’. Student creates an analogy, mental image or scenario e.g. ‘imagine if ’’, ‘could’. Student provides a challenge or counterexample e.g. ‘Yeah, but … ?’, ‘But then … ’, ‘What if … ?’, ‘No’. Student indicates a change of mind or perspective.

S: If courgettes was the best-selling last year, they’re going to … they might be the best-selling this year. S: We could draw like a bee coming into a flower.

S: No they’re not [amphibians], they’re reptiles.

S: I’ve changed my idea.

Identifying act types As shown in Table 11.3, there are 12 act types identified in the ESC student talk moves. Within the framework, different student contributions are categorised by acts. An act is a small unit of discourse realised by one or more utterances produced by the same speaker. It occurs as a constituent segment of a talk turn or corresponds with a turn itself. Act boundaries within a stretch of discourse are indicated in one or more ways: a change of speaker, a change of talk focus, a change of discourse type (e.g. from narration to evaluation) and a change of semantic relation between acts often explicitly signalled by such connectives as ‘and’ (additive), ‘because’ (causal), ‘but’ (adversative) and ‘and then’ (temporal). Identifying act types are also often indicated by signalling words such as ‘reason’, ‘because’, ‘agree/disagree’, ‘I think’, ‘should’, ‘imagine’, ‘wrong’, ‘why’, ‘might’, ‘if ’, ‘maybe’, ‘would’, ‘could’. Seeing certain words as proximal indices of talk types has been discussed in the works of, for example, Mercer, Wgerif and Dawes (1999) and Soter et al. (2008). Another factor to take into consideration when categorising student contributions is that acts tend to go together in pairs, for example, student evaluate and student justify as in ‘I like that because … ’ and student argue and student justify as in ‘I think … because … ’. Furthermore, the position of an act within a teaching exchange (i.e. what precedes and follows it) can be used to determine the type of act. For example, teacher questions such as ‘can you explain that?’, ‘do you agree or disagree and why?’ and ‘can you repeat what has just been said?’ directly influence the act types that follow.

158

Student talk moves in whole-class teaching

Inter-rater reliability In order to systematically analyse the large data set of 134 lessons, 4 coders were recruited from a cohort of PhD students studying educational linguistics and trained over a period of 2 weeks. The coders were also involved in the iterative process of testing and refining the coding scheme.The coding inter-reliability between the coders was calculated using Cohen’s Kappa. After four training sessions and three checks on the inter-rater reliability of the coders in the Observer software, the level of agreement between the pairs reached nearly 80 per cent (Kappa = 0.73 and Kappa = 0.75). Despite drawing on a combination of indicators to identify the boundaries and types of acts, the coding process was not without challenges. A key challenge was a lack of fit between the form and function of an act. For example, an unmarked student explain and a linguistically signalled (‘because’) student justify are quite different in form but may serve the same function in relation to the ‘why?’ question. To address this challenge, inter-reliability checks were carried out with four coders and the definitions were refined accordingly, resulting in distinctions being drawn, for example, between the function of student explain (i.e. not to convince or persuade) and student justify (to convince or persuade). There were also be cases where more than one code could be applied to a particular act. In this instance, the same iterative process of conferring between coders was carried out to reach a consensus by drawing on, for example, discourse markers, juxtapositions and changes in the focus of the talk.

Illustrating the application of the coding framework As part of the process evaluation of the dialogic teaching intervention, 134 video-recorded lessons, each lasting one timetabled hour, were collected from 15 teachers in the intervention schools and 11 teachers from the control schools in England. In order to systematically analyse the large database of lesson recordings, a computerised observation software package known as The Observer XT 12.5 was used to quantify the coded talk moves (see Alexander, Hardman, Hardman, Rajab & Longmore, 2017). A sub-sample of the video-taped lessons (54) were transcribed, and lesson episodes from these were qualitatively analysed with a focus on student talk moves and acts using the coding schemes in Tables 11.2 and 11.3. A primary aim of the analysis was to examine the kinds of student talk promoted by the dialogic teaching intervention. Excerpts of different lengths representing mathematics, English and science classroom talk from the intervention group of schools were selected to illustrate the identification and analysis of a range of student moves and act types. Table 11.4 is an episode taken from a mathematics lesson. The discussion in this episode is about solving mathematical problems which involved measuring the sizes of different fields and figuring out which vegetables of different sizes (e.g. carrots, potatoes and courgettes) could be planted to get the best return. This excerpt captures a rich whole-class discussion involving a number of students and illustrates a diverse range of discourse moves used by the students. For example, in Turn 1, S1 expresses her position by disagreeing with another student’s contribution (‘I disagree with Sharee … ’) and, in Turn 3, states her opinion (‘I think … ’) followed by a justification (‘because … ’). In Turn 5, S2 joins in the discussion and makes an extended contribution consisting of student challenge (‘But won’t you want the same amount?’) followed by a student justify (‘Because … ’), and student argue (‘So I think I have to disagree … ’) followed by student justify (‘because … ’). The occurrence of the paired student argue and student justify can again be seen in the subsequent Turn 6 by S3 and Turn 8 by S4. A different type of act student speculate (‘If you … ’) occurs in Turn 10 by S5. A student shift position by S4 (‘I’ve changed my mind’) can be seen in Turn 15.

159

Table 11.4 Mathematics TURN 1

S1

2 3

T S1

4 5

T S2

6

S3

7

T

8

S4

9 10

S5

11 12 13 14 15

T S5 T S4 T

I disagree with Sharee about putting courgettes in the smaller field. Yeah, go on. I think put the courgettes in the big field, because it’s a bigger field and you’ll get more than if you put in the smaller field. You will. Go on Michael. But won’t you want the same amount? Because it doesn’t matter how many you put in field four with the potatoes, or the carrots, it still won’t get to the courgettes and you’re just helping the courgettes get more and more and more and more. So I think I have to disagree with you on that one, because I think you’ve got to keep it a balance, like if I were there. I’m still going with Charlie, because if you put the courgettes in the bigger field, you’re going to take them to the shops and they’re going to give you more money. They’re going to give you more money.Yeah, probably, probably. Maeve? I’m going with Michael on this one because if you put the courgettes in the smaller field, that means- you get, like, more … like better stuff that you want to put in the bigger field, so if you just like courgettes that much, you could put them in the smaller field, but if you like turnips more then … didn’t like courgettes, you could just put turnips in the biggest field. Put them in the biggest field. Alfie, shaking your head. Go on. If you actually figure out from last year’s harvest which was the best-selling, you can put the, what was the best-selling one in the biggest field, which is two. Yes, super. So I don’t agree with Michael and Maeve. You don’t agree with either of them, no. I like it. I’ve changed my idea. You’ve changed your idea, interesting. Go on.

R-MOVE

ACTS

ESC

SArg

ESC

SArg SJus

ESC

SCh SJus

SArg SJus ESC

SArg SJus

ESC

SArg S Jus

ESC

SSpec

BSC

SArg

BSC

SSP

Student talk moves in whole-class teaching

Table 11.5 is an episode of an English lesson. The focus of this whole-class discussion is on the costs of buying healthy foods compared to unhealthy foods. In Turn 1 the teacher explicitly asks S1 to expand on her idea ‘so expand on that’. In response, a student expand is provided in Turn 2. The discussion is kept open, and in Turn 3 the teacher nominates S2, Randeep (who raised his hand) to contribute. S2 then makes an extended contribution consisting of three act types: student imagine (‘Miss, like, say you walk into Tesco or Lidl … ’); student rephrase (‘like what Sukina said … ’) and student recount (‘I went to the shop and actually saw this … ’). This contribution reinforces the argument that healthy foods are more expensive than unhealthy foods. Table 11.6 presents a short segment of a whole-class discussion in a science lesson. The discussion is about growth and is comparing a living thing (human body) with a non-living Table 11.5 English TURN

R-MOVE

1

T

2

S1

3

T

4

S2

Yeah, so chocolate has a longer sell-by-date, doesn’t it? But having fruit, it can go out of date quite quickly, so expand on that. Well, if you buy, like, loads of fruit, you’d have ESC that one day, then two days later you’re going to have to buy more, a little bit more. Good, that’s a really nice idea, actually, so therefore it’s going to have an impact on the amount that your parents have to spend. Randeep? ESC Miss, like, say you walk into Tesco or Lidl, or whatever shop you shop in, and the first thing, which most people used to see, is now – it’s like the season where you see Easter eggs, and Easter eggs, and chocolate. So you walk in, and you can see lots of chocolate; but then, you see the chocolate, and chocolate can be, like what Sukina said, chocolate can be a pound, and then you go over, and – I went to the shop and actually saw this – and there was this little box, like this big, and it had three watermelon sticks, and it was £2.

ACTS

SE/Ana

SImag

SSrep SRec

Table 11.6 Science TURN 1

T

2 3

S1 S2

So you’re saying the air that we put into it, the blood is what looks(?) into us and we get that put into us, that’s into us, that’s produced and that’s the air, go on Luke, say it? How does blood make it grow? Like, do you know when your hand pumps all the blood around, when it moves up and down, it like expands a little bit – 

161

R-MOVE

ACTS

OSQ ESC

SE/Ana

Jan Hardman

thing (balloon). This excerpt illustrates a very rare example of open student question in Turn 2 (‘How does blood make it grow?’), which is followed by student explain in Turn 3.

Overall findings from the micro-analysis of student talk As shown in Table 11.7, the micro-level analysis of lesson transcripts using the coding framework as set out in Table 11.3 reveals the nature, character and quality of student talk to be much richer in intervention schools following the dialogic teaching professional development programme than that traditionally found in teacher-led recitation. In the control schools, the analysis shows that student talk in English, mathematics and science was limited in type and quality and that the explanation offered by students often lacked reasons and evidence and therefore read as assertions. Other types of learning talk such as expansion/addition (i.e. saying more by building on, adding to or extending own or another student’s contribution), argument (stating a position or opinion), justification (providing evidence or reasoning) and challenge (providing a challenge or a counter-example) were used but to a limited extent. In science, the control group of students predominantly provided explanation, accounting for 66 per cent of their contributions, and in mathematics, it accounted for 85 per cent of their contributions. By contrast, the repertoires of student talk moves used by students in the intervention schools were much broader, relying less on student explanation and using a greater range of act types which reflect a deeper conceptual understanding and high levels of evaluation, justification and argumentation across English, mathematics and science reflecting a much greater use of the following ESC act types: SArg, SJustify, SChallenge, SEvaluate, SShifPosition. Differences between the intervention and control group students were especially significant for the SArg and SJustify act types. Overall, students in the intervention group had become markedly more expansive in their contributions and exhibited higher levels of explanation, analysis, argumentation, challenge and justification, suggesting their talk was more dialogic compared to their control group peers. Differences between the two groups were most marked in mathematics, whereby extended student contributions in the intervention group were 6 times (mean frequency = 12.6) higher than that of the control group (2.5). Students questions, however, were rare in both the intervention and control schools suggesting the need for professional development programmes focusing on developing the whole-class talk repertoire to include strategies for teachers that can be used to encourage student-generated questions. For example, it could include asking students to work in pairs or groups to generate their own questions about the topic under consideration for use with another pair, group or whole class, both at the start of the lesson and during plenaries/ summaries, to provide the teacher with insights into student understanding and to consolidate student learning.

Discussion and conclusion As discussed in this chapter, the purpose of the analytical framework was to advance our understanding of student learning talk in the whole-class teaching of primary English, mathematics and science as teachers broaden their repertoire of questioning approaches. As discussed earlier, research suggests broadening the repertoire of questioning moves will help teachers achieve a better balance of open and closed questions. Opening up the F-move will help promote higher levels of student contributions and prompt them to share, expand and elaborate upon their ideas by providing evidence to support their claims and by building on the reasoning of others in the class. 162

Student expand/add Student connect Student explain/analyse Student rephrase Student recount Student evaluate Student argue Student justify Student speculate Student imagine Student challenge Student shift position Total of ESC Mean frequency

Sub-types of extended student contributions – – 85% 5% – – 10% – – – – – 20 2.5

7.01% – 42.10% 7.01% 1.75% 1.75% 7.01% 7.01% 5.26% 21.05% – – 57 7.12

3.96% 0.79% 22.22% 3.96% – – 30.95% 27.77% – 1.58% 6.34% 2.38% 126 12.6

6.87% 3.05% 33.58% 1.52% 1.52% 3.81% 25.95% 15.26% 4.58% 1.52% 2.29% – 131 13.1

Control

Intervention

Intervention

Control

Mathematics

English

Table 11.7 Sub-types of extended student contributions in English, mathematics and science

5.30% 2.27% 39.39% 0.75% 0.75% 0.75% 14.39% 31.06% – – 4.54% 0.75% 132 13.2

Intervention

Science

5.66% – 66.03% 3.77% 3.77% – 7.54% 7.54% 3.77% 1.88% – – 53 6.62

Control

Jan Hardman

Extended student contributions can be regarded as a key indicator of the quality of classroom talk. Such indicators can be used by teachers and mentors and shared with students as an analytical tool for investigating pedagogical practices while striving to implement a dialogic pedagogy leading to different levels of student participation. Research into the professional development of teachers suggests monitoring and self-evaluation will need to become a regular part of in-service training to give teachers a degree of ownership of the process of school improvement (Coe, Aloisi, Higgins & Elliot Major, 2014; Darling-Hammond, Burns, Campbell, Goodwin & Low, 2018). Critical reflection on classroom practices is seen as a way of enhancing expert thinking and problem-solving to bridge the gap between theories and actual classroom practice (Sedova, 2017).Teachers also need opportunities to theorise their teaching to make confident and professionally informed decisions about the way they interact with students to encourage greater participation and higher levels of cognitive engagement (Hennessy, Dragovic & Warwick, 2018). Studies looking at dimensions of teacher development suggest that it is essential that teachers have supportive interactions with peers through modelling and feedback if the teacher-led recitation script is to be changed (Sedova, Sedlacek & Svaricek, 2016). Coaching and talkanalysis feedback, supported by video-recordings, audio and transcribed sections of lessons, can be an effective starting point for implementing a dialogic pedagogy at the whole-school level (Saito & Khong, 2017). Such approaches can also be used with students to develop their metadiscoursal awareness and understanding of how participating in whole-class and group-based talk is extending their thinking, argumentation, reasoning and communication skills, leading to higher learning outcomes. In addition to the provision of more powerful school-based professional development programmes using observation, coaching and talk-analysis feedback to challenge and change underlying pedagogical practices, there is the need for more comprehensive evidence, for both teachers and policy makers, that a dialogic pedagogy can produce significant gains in student learning as well as social and emotional benefits (Resnick, Asterhan, Clarke & Schantz, 2018). Longitudinal studies tracking the scale-up of national reforms designed to implement a dialogic pedagogy in schools using both impact and process evaluations will help build such an evidence base.

Acknowledgements This chapter is based on a study funded by the UK’s Education Endowment Foundation entitled ‘Classroom talk, social disadvantage and educational attainment: raising standards, closing the gap’. It was a collaboration between the University of York and the Cambridge Primary Review Trust in the UK. The project team consisted of Professor Robin Alexander, Professor Frank Hardman, Dr Jan Hardman, Dr Taha Rajab, Mark Longmore and David Reedy.

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12 VISUAL LEARNING ANALYTICS TO SUPPORT CLASSROOM DISCOURSE ANALYSIS FOR TEACHER PROFESSIONAL LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT Gaowei Chen

Introduction The conceptualization of dialogic instruction has achieved some consensus among researchers and teacher/educators, although they use different terms for it—for example, academically productive talk, Accountable Talk, dialogic teaching, dialogic inquiry, and productive classroom dialogue (Alexander, Chapter 47 in this volume; Michaels & O’Connor, 2015; Pehmer, Gröschner, & Seidel, 2015; Resnick, Michaels, & O’Connor, 2010; Wells, 1999; Wells & Ball, 2008). Researchers agree that dialogue is an important classroom tool for coordinating and encouraging student thinking, reasoning, and argumentation and that certain forms of dialogue are productive for learning (Alexander, 2017; Gillies, 2016; Hennessy, Mercer, & Warwick, 2011; Howe & Abedin, 2013; Howe & Hennessy, & Mercer this volume; Howe, Hennessy, Mercer, Vrikki, & Wheatley, 2019; Littleton & Mercer, 2013; Michaels & O’Connor, 2015; Osborne, 2010; Resnick et al., 2010; Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, Chapter 18 in this volume). One essential element of dialogic instruction is that students should be guided to verbalize, share, and coconstruct knowledge about the subject matter, not only individually but also by interacting with others (Clarke, Resnick, & Rosé, 2015; Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008). For this, teachers play an important role in facilitating the dialogic process.The effective use of classroom talk by teachers has been shown to be a key influence on student understanding and skill development (Alexander, 2017; Osborne, 2010; Resnick, Asterhan, & Clarke, 2015). Further, when students respond to each other’s ideas and elaborate on their own thinking, they have opportunities to re-examine their prior knowledge, test their mental models—whether complete or incomplete—and evaluate one another’s hypotheses, all of which contributes to learning (Gillies, 2017; Mercer, 1996; Webb et al., 2014). Such opportunities may even have a retention and transfer effect from one domain to another—for example, from mathematics and science to literacy (Adey & Shayer, 2015; Chapin, O’Connor, & Anderson, 2009;Topping & Trickey, 2007). Despite the demonstrable benefits of effective classroom talk on student learning, teachers often find it difficult to engage their students in effective discussions that involve deep reasoning 167

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and argumentation (Clarke et al., 2013; Howe & Abedin, 2013; O’Connor & Snow, 2017). Many studies have shown that teachers find it challenging to learn and integrate effective conversations into classroom practices (e.g., Mercer, Dawes, & Staarman, 2009; McNeill & Pimentel, 2010; Pimentel & McNeill, 2013). Other researchers have observed that classroom discourse often follows a monologic lecture or recitation style with the teacher dominating the interactive process, and discussion-based productive talk with the students elaborating on their own ideas and engaging in each other’s thinking was largely absent (Clarke et al., 2013; Kane & Staiger, 2012; Mehan & Cazden, 2015; O’Connor & Snow, 2017;Webb et al., 2014).Therefore, researchers and practitioners are interested not only in how the structure and delivery of classroom talk relate to the quality of teaching and learning but also—and more importantly—how the analysis of classroom talk can inform teacher professional learning and classroom practice (Hennessy & Davies this volume). The development of digital technology, meanwhile, is affecting every discipline, including teacher education and professional development (PD). Due to the growing popularity of video recording, playing, storing, and sharing technologies, it is now relatively easy to capture large amounts of classroom data about teacher–student talk. That teachers can access video-recorded authentic classroom data is likely to transform current formats of teacher professional learning and development into video-based or video-embedded styles of learning. According to two recent literature reviews, over the last decade the number of studies reporting the use of video in teacher education and PD, covering a range of subject areas and involving teachers at different school levels, including early childhood, primary, and secondary schools, has increased considerably (Gaudin & Chaliès, 2015; Major & Watson, 2018). Indeed, video as a tool has many advantages for teachers to reflect on their own or on general classroom talk. One of the most attractive characteristics of video-embedded PD is its ability to offer evidence supported by data, which, if used appropriately, has the potential to help interpret the teachers’ current discourse behaviour, identify patterns, and support decision-making for future classroom practice. This process aligns with a new paradigm in the emergent field of data science—from data to knowledge and action (Berman et al., 2018). Nevertheless, the emergent video-embedded PD for learning about classroom discourse is not without challenges. For example, one difficulty is somewhat generic and concerns the principles and procedures of using videos in teacher learning and PD programs. Another, more specific, challenge concerns the theories and methodologies of classroom discourse analysis for supporting teacher learning. To address these, this chapter first reviews the relevant literature on video-embedded teacher education. It then discusses the theories of classroom discourse pedagogy and analysis, which is followed by a methodological proposal for employing visual learning analytics to support the analysis and representation of large amounts of video-recorded classroom discourse data.The chapter also presents a visual learning analytics tool, the Classroom Discourse Analyzer (CDA; Chen et al., 2018; Chen, Clarke, & Resnick, 2015; Ni et al., 2017), which offers one approach to employing visual learning analytics technologies to facilitate teacher analysis and learning about dialogic teaching. The chapter ends by suggesting directions for future research.

Video-based teacher PD Affordances In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the use of video as a tool to facilitate teacher reflection on classroom lessons (e.g., Borko, 2016; Kersting et al., 2016; Hennessy, Dragovic, & Warwick, 2018; Kleinknecht & Schneider, 2013; Sherin & Dyer, 2017; van Es, 2012; Yeh & Santagata, 2015). The use of video offers several benefits. First, it has the capacity to capture the 168

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richness and complexity of classroom dialogues in lesson activities without losing authenticity (Gaudin & Chaliès, 2015; Lemke, 2007; Sherin, 2004). Second, video can be played repeatedly and paused at any time (Spiro, Collins, & Ramchandran, 2007), giving teachers time to think reflectively about discursive practice. Third, video-based reflection contains multiple perspectives (Ward & McCotter, 2004), which situates the teachers’ exploration of dialogic teaching in a more nuanced way than by using other training materials, such as text-based discourse samples (Borko, Jacobs, Eiteljorg, & Pittman, 2008; Seidel, Stürmer, Blomberg, Kobarg, & Schwindtl., 2011). Finally, the automated nature of video recording enables the systematic observation of the teachers’ lessons and can track the development of discursive practice over time. However, video presents new challenges as well. Because video-recording makes large amounts of discourse data available to teachers, it is difficult for them to read and analyse all of the data themselves (Derry et al., 2010; Erickson, 2011). Even so, it seems inevitable that computer-supported classroom discourse analysis will be normal practice for the classroom teacher (see Mercer, 2010 for the strength and weakness of computer-supported discourse analysis).

Challenges Some researchers point out that simply providing video in PD does not ensure the success of teacher learning (Blomberg, Sherin, Renkl, & Seidel, 2014; Gaudin & Chaliès, 2015; Hennessy, Haßler, & Hofmann, 2015; Kang & van Es, 2018; Major & Watson, 2018), and a review of the literature reveals two challenges, at least, of video-based PD: (1) how to embed video into PD design, and (2) how to provide high-quality support to teacher-learners. Researchers need to address the challenges by considering the following: 1) The principles and procedures for designing video-embedded teacher PD programs about dialogic instruction 2) The theories and methodologies to analyse and represent classroom discourse, especially video-recorded classroom discourse, to support teacher professional learning and development Currently, the principles and procedures in the literature on effective video-embedded teacher learning design have been primarily in pre-service teacher education. For example, Blomberg, Renkl, Sherin, Borko, and Seidel (2013) proposed the Five Research-based Heuristics for thinking about how to use video to create well-conceptualized pre-service teacher learning environments. For another, Kang and van Es (2018) proposed the Principled Use of Videos (PUV) framework. Both models address video-based teacher learning in pre-service education, and both regard it as important for achieving carefully designed teacher learning goals, tasks/activities, video material use, and other support, such as the assessment or post-viewing facilitation, for effective teacher learning. Van Es and Sherin (2002) proposed three steps for pre-service teachers during video analysis to “notice” classroom interactions: (1) identifying a noteworthy episode, (2) making connections with broader teaching and learning principles, and (3) reasoning about the classroom interactions based on the context. Building on van Es and Sherin’s (2002) ideas, Santagata and Angelici (2010) developed the Lesson Analysis Framework (LAF) for pre-service teachers to learn from videos of classroom teaching. They both value the theory and learning goals in the analysis, and both emphasize a reasoning process for effective teacher learning. They also promote reflective and productive discussion-based learning in pre-service teacher programs. Although these procedures are designed to embed videos in pre-service teacher learning, to some degree they are adaptable for guiding the design of in-service teacher PD learning about dialogic instruction. 169

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Some famous classroom interaction patterns about the theories and methodologies for analysing classroom discourse were discovered in the 1970s, such as teacher-led triadic structures of initiation–response–feedback (IRF) by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) and initiation–response– evaluation (IRE) by Mehan (1979). More recently, researchers have drawn from linguistic, sociolinguistic, ethnographic, sociocultural, and conversational analysis for conceptualizing the classroom discourse interactions that help improve teaching and student learning (Howe et al., 2019; Howe & Abedin, 2013; Mercer & Dawes, 2014; Jay et al., 2017; Khong, Saito, & Gillies, 2017). For example, based on sociocultural theories, especially those concerned with how learning takes place through social interactions in the classroom (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Vygotsky, 1978), theories such as Academically Productive Talk (or Accountable Talk; Michaels & O’Connor, 2015; Michaels et al., 2008; Resnick et al., 2010), Collaborative Reasoning (Anderson, Chinn, Waggoner, & Nguyen, 1998; Reznitskaya et al., 2009), Dialogic Teaching (Alexander, 2001, 2008, 2017), Dialogic Inquiry (Wells, 1999; Wells & Ball, 2008), Exploratory Talk (Barnes, 1976, 2008), Thinking Together (Dawes, Mercer, & Wegerif, 2000; Littleton & Mercer, 2013; Mercer, Hennessy, & Warwick, in press; Mercer, Wegerif, & Dawes, 1999; Wegerif, 2007, 2010; Wegerif, Mercer, & Dawes, 1999), and Metatalk (i.e., talk about talk, EdwardsGroves & Davidson, Chapter 9 in this volume) focusing either on student–student interactions or teacher–student interactions with the common goal of opening classroom dialogues to promote student learning (F. Hardman, Chapter 10 in this volume). They not only advanced pedagogy but also the analysis and interpretation of classroom discourse processes. The recent development of the coding schemes includes, for example, the coding frameworks proposed by Hennessy et al. (2016), Howe et al. (2019), Soter, Wilkinson, Murphy, Rudge, & Reninger (2006/2016), and J. Hardman (Chapter 11 in this volume, on student talk and contribution), which have provided useful analytical frameworks and tools for researchers using classroom discourse analysis. Nevertheless, as massive video-recorded classroom discourse data becomes increasingly available—with the prospect of it becoming a prevalent teacher PD resource in the near future— methodological innovations exploring the analysis of large volumes of classroom discourse data are now needed.To address the analysis and representation challenges of massive video-recorded classroom discourse data for teacher learning and professional development, this chapter presents a novel approach leveraging visual learning analytics technologies in the next section.

Visual learning analytics-supported classroom discourse analysis The section first discusses the definition of visual analytics and visual learning analytics, followed by an overview of the complexities of analysing classroom discourse for teacher learning in PD. To this end, it will explain (a) the promise of visual learning analytics in addressing the challenges of analysing and representing large volumes of video-recorded classroom discourse data and (b) the ways in which visual learning analytics are likely to assist classroom teachers. It will then present an example of using visual learning analytics technologies to assist classroom discourse analysis in teacher PD by introducing the Classroom Discourse Analyzer (CDA; Chen et al., 2018; Chen et al., 2015) and a research agenda suggesting directions for future research.

Visual analytics An often-cited definition of visual analytics (VA) by Thomas and Cook (2005) states that visual analytics is “the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces” (p. 4). According to Keim, Mansmann, & Thomas (2009), the key to VA is “the new enabling and 170

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accessible analytic reasoning interactions supported by the combination of automated and visual analysis” (p. 5). Two elements are worth noting here. First, as explained by the authors, because the complexity of some problems makes a fully automated or fully visual analysis impossible for problem-solving, it is necessary to combine the two and use the human ability for decisionmaking in the process of data analysis. The inevitable human involvement in handling complex data is probably why Keim et al. (2009) emphasized the process of “analytic reasoning interactions” in their definition of VA.The complexities of analysing classrooms discourse are discussed in the next section. Second, Keim et al. (2009) raised our awareness of two types of analysis in VA research, one of which is automated analysis—such as statistics and data mining techniques—and the other is visual analysis, such as information visualization and interaction techniques. Keim et al. (2009) pointed out that, “One of the most important steps in this direction was the need to move from confirmatory data analysis to exploratory data analysis” (p. 5). In an era of big data, the purpose of VA research is, accordingly, to turn the challenge of information overload into an opportunity to enable data-informed decision-making and actions mediated by human interactions (Keim, Mansmann, Schneidewind, & Ziegler, 2006). Research on VA has begun to appear in education—although educators considered two closely related fields, learning analytics (LA) and educational data mining (EDM), some time ago. There are overlaps concerning the goals of the three fields. LA aims at leveraging technologies to collect, analyse, measure, and report data about learners and their learning to ensure understanding and optimization of learning and decision-making (Ferguson, 2012; Fishman, Davis, & Chan, 2014; Gašević, Dawson, & Siemens, 2015; Shum & Ferguson, 2012). With a similar purpose in education, EDM focuses on the design and application of automated methods for discovering and modeling educational data (Siemens & Baker, 2012).Visual analytics overlap with LA and EDM, which, as previously discussed, combine data analysis and information visualization to facilitate human interactive processing and exploration (Keim et al., 2009; Thomas & Cook, 2006).

Visual learning analytics In a recent review study, Vieira, Parsons, and Byrd (2018) combined the perspectives of visual analytics and learning analytics to coin the term visual learning analytics (VLA), which refers to “the use of computational tools and methods for understanding educational phenomena through interactive visualization techniques” (p. 120). This present paper defines VLA as the employment of visual analytics (i.e., analytics and visualization technologies) to inform educational decision-making. It borrows the term “visual analytics” (VA) for use in education from Keim et al. (2006) and Thomas and Cook (2006) to refer to the use of interactive visualization and analytical reasoning techniques. Moreover, while it includes the goals of learning and education in the definition, it equally emphasizes the means and processes to achieve learning by human–computer interactions for exploratory data analysis, believing that VLA is not confined to automated visualization and analytics but includes individual and collaborative reasoning and problem-solving processes. As noted previously, data are created today at an unprecedented rate, far faster than earlier techniques could collate and analyse. What was feasible in the past regarding pattern identification and discourse interpretation tasks are now extraordinarily demanding. In the next section, the complexities of analysing a large quantity of video-recorded classroom discourse data for teacher PD use are discussed and visual learning analytics is proposed as a suitable methodology for addressing this challenge. 171

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Complexities of analysing classrooms discourse for teacher PD There are at least three principal aspects of complexity that make fully automated or fully human analysis inefficient and constitute the premise of a research agenda for employing visual learning analytics to support teacher sense-making and reasoning process in video-based PD.

The complexity of classroom discourse data First, classroom discourse interaction is a high cognition activity involving multiple parties (i.e., at least a teacher and many students).They can achieve effective communication in conversations through multiple means, and the interpretation of discourse meaning often requires knowing the background and schematic knowledge beyond simple words and text (Kintsch, 1974). This complexity makes machine interpretation of classroom discourse difficult. Furthermore, classroom discourse is often influenced by instructional content and subject knowledge, as well as by other variables in the dynamic classroom context, such as “instructional clarity and intelligibility, coherence and correctness, engagement, equity, and time”—what O’Connor and Snow (2017) and O’Connor, Michaels, Chapin, & Harbaugh (2017) describe as the “ecology of instruction”. Hence, any fully automated analysis of the classroom is difficult—although partly automated analysis, as in the definition of visual analytics by Keim et al. (2009), with the human interactive exploration assisted by computer-extracted data and results, is feasible and likely to be helpful.

The complexities of PD tasks Second, from the discussions about principles and procedures of effective design of videoembedded teacher education and PD learning, we know that the complexities of PD tasks may come from the learning goals. For classroom lesson observations, the learning goals are often multiple, integrated, and comprehensive. As it can be seen from the “noticing” example, the learning and analysis tasks for pre-service teachers may include at least the “noticing” of student thinking, teacher roles, and the discourse interaction between them in classroom interactions (van Es & Sherin, 2002). It seems that a pre-defined, product-oriented presentation of the results alone (i.e., confirmatory data analysis) is not sufficient to meet the multiple exploratory nature of teacher PD learning tasks. Therefore, visual learning analytics, having the characteristics of visual analytics to assist exploratory data analysis (Keim et al., 2009) and emphasizing the importance of human involvement in the process of data exploration, can be employed to facilitate the design and implementation of PD tasks for optimizing teacher learning effects, as this paper proposes.

The complexity of teachers Third, teacher-learners are not always homogeneous, especially among in-service teachers.They have different levels of experience, expertise, and pre-existing pedagogical knowledge; in other words, some are novices, some are semi-experienced teachers, and some are experts. Since teachers may have diversified learning needs in PD, even for the topic of effective classroom talk, some may believe that they are skilled at this type of classroom practice and that reflection is unnecessary, while others may find it beneficial. Therefore, product-oriented confirmatory results for all teachers are unlikely to satisfy the heterogeneity of all teachers’ learning needs. Visual learning analytics that emphasize the teachers’ involvement in a process-oriented interactive way to explore the classroom data might, therefore, be helpful. 172

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The interactions among the previous three complexities as well as with other factors such as the diverse local educational context make analysing classroom discourse for teacher PD even more complex. Yet, the principles and procedures for video-based teacher PD design in the literature provide insights for solving these complexities through an effective visual learning analytics design.

A potential solution from visual learning analytics As van Es and Sherin (2002), Santagata and Angelici (2010), and other researchers have suggested, the reasoning process in which teachers are actively engaged is beneficial for teacher learning. In addition to the reasoning process, Blomberg and colleagues (2013) and Kang and van Es (2018) have suggested that support by various means (e.g., expert coaches, facilitators, computerassisted discourse analysis) can assist the teacher reasoning process. Therefore, it is critical to consider how visual learning analytics provides a means to support the reasoning process for teacher learning and development in their PD. It is argued that visual learning analytics through human–computer interactions for exploratory data analysis may achieve this goal. In the next section, the Classroom Discourse Analyzer (Chen et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2018; Ni et al., 2017), a visual learning analytics tool, is introduced, followed by the illustration of how it may solve the complexities of classroom discourse analysis for teacher learning in PD.

A visual learning analytics tool—Classroom Discourse Analyzer Supporting classroom discourse analysis in PD The CDA tool provides three types of affordances for supporting classroom discourse analysis as the content of teacher PD learning: 1) data access, 2) data navigation, and 3) evidence extraction. First, it may save teachers considerable time reading the classroom discourse data (i.e., data access). The visualization design of CDA provides a visual outline for teachers; they can look at the bubble icons first, which represents conversational turns. Each bubble is a turn, containing temporal (when, by the horizontal position in the timeline), graphical (what, by the size of the bubble), and identity (who, by the color of the bubble) information. Turn is the time during which a speaker holds the floor in a conversation (Levinson, 1983; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974).Turns can be easily segmented by machine, signaled by the change of a speaker (e.g., from the teacher to a student), which is one of the reasons CDA uses turns as the basic unit represented by bubble icons. Second, after an overview of the visual outline of classroom discourse at the turn level, CDA allows teachers to quickly locate an episode of interest to study the content within its classroom context, as suggested in the literature (Mercer, 2008; Nystrand, Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser, & Long, 2003) (i.e., data navigation). This efficiency probably is due to the design of the CDA, which follows the famous Visual Information Seeking Mantra—“Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand” (Shneiderman, 1996, p. 2)—and is consistent with the human information processing schemata, from general information to specific. Third, CDA helps teachers extract discourse patterns of higher inference than at the words, turns, turn-taking identity levels, by providing, for example, (in the current version by human coding) Accountable Talk moves (Resnick et al., 2010) listed as shown/hidden options (i.e., evidence extraction). As shown in Figure 12.1, teachers and their peers first receive an overview of classroom talk in the default interface and can quickly identify potentially meaningful discussion segments 173

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Figure 12.1 A screenshot of the CDA’s bubble visualization. The bubble size indicates the number of words in a turn and each horizontal line represents a participant’s utterances along the timeline. “All” indicates all speakers, and “T” indicates a teacher.

based on several features that may interest them (e.g., sequence in the horizontal timeline, size of bubbles representing words volume in the turn, a specific color representing a speaker). They can then click on the graph to view detailed episodes in the corresponding video clips or on the detailed words and turn moves in transcripts to have a contextualized view to examine; for example, whether the teacher in the video has recognized student thinking at the moment and managed the classroom talk appropriately. By providing both quick access to the discourse content in a general view and allowing teachers to have a detailed further analysis in context, CDA may help teachers make an appropriate judgment about their teaching behaviour to inform their future decisions. Hence, the teacher’s exploration of video-based classroom-talk behaviour assisted by the visual analytics functions of CDA is likely to overcome the difficulty of relying on machine-automated interpretation of classroom discourse meaning. In addition to the suggestion from a general-to-specific view of classroom talk, teachers may click the checkbox of Accountable Talk moves (Resnick et al., 2010) to view the frequency, percentage, summary, and other statistical results of each talk move. If teacher-learners are interested, they may further study the detailed discourse content of the talk in the video/transcript context. It is worth noting that the multiple displays of data formats—bubble graph, video, transcripts, and the coding of Accountable Talk moves—are designed to provide multiple levels of resources for efficient data access, data navigation, and evidence extraction. These data formats are synchronized, easy to switch, or to have an aligned view. When a teacher clicks a place in the bubble display, its video and transcript locations are activated and await the teacher to study and/or reflect on further.

Supporting PD tasks CDA itself does not provide a solution to the complexities of teacher PD tasks but, being a tool in the VLA-supported teacher PD approach, assists in the practical design and implementation of teacher PD tasks. Again, the CDA has at least three affordances that feature in its contribution to the design and implementation of PD tasks. First, CDA is an adaptive PD tool due to its process-oriented exploratory data analysis, assisted by visual learning analytics, which may satisfy the teacher’s individualized learning needs. The degree of adaptability of teacher PD models refers to what Koellner and Jacobs (2015) have proposed, a continuum of the PD models from highly “specified” to highly “adaptive” at the 174

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two extremes. Because of the massive volume of video-based classroom talk data that can be represented in CDA, in their exploration of classroom discourse data different teacher viewers may identify different segments of interest for further study or analysis. PD tasks, therefore, can be designed to be more open-ended to allow individual teachers to explore the discourse data rather than to request a highly specified yes/no or correct/incorrect answer as an item. What is more, the PD tasks should be designed not only to engage individual teachers but also to engage the professional learning community (PLC), by discussing, interpreting, and making judgements together to improve their daily teaching (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Little, 2002; Putnam & Borko, 2000; Sherin & Han, 2004). Second, the capacity for processing classroom discourse data and allowing exploratory data analysis of CDA is likely to make it better suited for supporting strategy- and insights-focused PD methods than those methods that provide simple prescriptions and/or a body of knowledge as a way for teacher learning. Kennedy (2016) has identified four major types of teacher PD methods—prescription, strategies, insights, and a body of knowledge— which are likely to lie along a continuum of increased reliance on the teacher’s ability to make professional judgements and decisions for “in-the-moment” teaching situations. The same study also found that, of the four methods mentioned previously, strategies and insights were the most effective PD methods for facilitating teacher learning and enactment. In this regard, the active engagement of teachers and their peers in the analysis of classroom discourse, assisted by data access, navigation, and extraction functions in CDA, is more likely to provide and support strategies- and insightsoriented teacher PD learning methods. Third, the procedure of general-to-a-specific view and the multiple contextualized discourse content representation formats (bubble graph, video, transcripts, discourse pattern coding) in CDA may promote individual and collaborative learning in PD tasks. As mentioned, the design of the CDA follows what Shneiderman (1996) has identified as a Visual Information Seeking Mantra (“Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand”) and is consistent with the human information processing schemata, from general to specific. In addition, most of the data presentation formats in CDA are of a single visual channel processing instead of multi-media visual and audial channels (e.g., in video)—the visual and muted way of processing classroom discourse content is argued to be ideal for group collaborative learning by teachers by this paper. For example, while observing the visual outline of the whole classroom discourse data in the bubble graph and/ or the detailed words/turns in transcripts, teachers may find it easy and natural to point at the discourse segments, discuss, interpret, and share their opinions with peers/coaches without the distraction of ambient sound. To some degree, it is less efficient without the mute visual learning analytics of CDA, with teacher-learners in their PLC needing to pause the video, discuss and fulfill the PD learning tasks, and then continue to view and pause. Facilitating collaborative learning in CDA may broaden the design of PD tasks and promote the learning effects.

Supporting teacher individualized learning needs As mentioned earlier, CDA has the advantage of engaging teachers in the exploratory data analysis process in PD, which may satisfy their individualized learning needs, as different teachers in the PD may have different learning needs concerning some aspects of classroom discourse (e.g., noticing of student mathematical thinking, encouraging students to engage with the thinking of others). Moreover, to help teacher-learners in PD to have a consistent development in their teaching practice, it is important to follow up on their enactment of the learned knowledge by observing the three-step PD circle: changes in knowledge, changes in teaching practice, and changes in their students’ learning (Kennedy, 2016). The large data processing capacity of CDA, 175

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therefore, may help teachers track their development trajectory over time. It is relatively easy for CDA to present the visual learning analytics of longitudinal (multi-years) classroom discourse data of either the same teacher or a group of teachers. In this way, teachers can use CDA to observe the PD effects from their own as well as their students’ changes in the classroom as a mechanism of continuous follow-up of the PD for promoting teaching and learning.

Directions for future research This chapter discussed the challenges of analysing (especially video-recorded) classroom discourse for teacher PD use. It also briefly reviewed the principles and procedures for designing effective video-supported teacher learning programs, as well as the emergent field of visual learning analytics by introducing a visual learning analytics-supported classroom discourse analysis tool (CDA) for PD use. It is argued that visual learning analytics, which combines automated analysis and information visualization and emphasizes process-oriented human involvement in the exploration of data, can be an efficient and effective method for addressing the analytical challenges. However, the field is developing rapidly. In addition to the aforementioned visual learning analytics-supported classroom discourse analysis for PD use, this paper proposes the following research agenda for deepening our understanding of this area: 1) Exploring technology-supported PD for more effective teacher collaboration 2) Conducting classroom discourse research in connection with other factors 3) Integrating visual learning analytics technologies with state-of-the-art educational theories and practices

Exploring technology-supported PD for more effective teacher collaboration Future research should expand the investigation into enabling video and visual learning analytics for more effective computer-supported teacher collaborative learning as new forms of teacher education and PD (Gaudin & Chaliès, 2015). The use of visual learning analytics technologies for promoting teacher collaborative learning could leverage group cognition and collective working memory (Kirschner, Sweller, Kirschner, & Zambrano, 2018) to maximize teacher learning and PD effects. Therefore, the design of visual learning analytics technologies in the field of classroom discourse analysis also needs to further investigate ways to create a collaborative space to facilitate teachers’ collaborative learning in PD (Hmelo-Silver & Barrows, 2006).

Conducting classroom discourse research in connection with other factors Classroom dialogue is multi-dimensional in structure (e.g., Miyazaki, Chapter 16 in this volume for the triadic relationship between the students, the learning topic, and the teacher). It is important to conduct technology-supported classroom discourse analysis and teacher PD research in connection with other factors. These factors may include issues of teacher and student motivation and ownership (Hennessy & Davies this volume), teacher attitudes and beliefs about dialogic education (Gröschner, Jähne and Klaß this volume, which develops the instrument of “Attitudes toward Dialogic Teaching Scale (ADT-S)” for investigating teachers’ attitudes toward dialogic teaching), teacher burnout (Mameli & Molinari, 2017), teacher transformation , student interest and motivation (Kiemer, 2017; Kiemer, Gröschner, Pehmer, & Seidel, 2015), student learning outcomes (Howe et al., 2019), and student emotions such as enjoyment and anxiety 176

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associated with dialogic instruction. Researchers could explore the inter-relationship between these factors and the effects of dialogic instruction in the dynamic classroom to understand the social, cognitive, and emotional mechanisms underlying dialogic education.

Integrating visual learning analytics technology with educational theories and practices Vieira and colleagues (2018) found that existing literature lacks studies integrating sophisticated visualization technologies with pedagogical practices and theories. In line with the findings, this chapter suggests that the design and development of visual learning analytics technologies should keep pace with state-of-the-art classroom discourse theories and stay up-to-date with relevant research and practice. VLA researchers need to draw on the recently developed classroom discourse analysis frameworks (e.g., J. Hardman, Chapter 11 in this volume, Hennessy et al., 2016; Howe et al., 2019; O’Connor & Michaels, in press) in their instructional design for PD. The VLA-supported PD also needs to connect with practitioners and schools to understand how teacher learning and changes in teaching take place, as many researchers have suggested (Hennessy et al., 2015; Major, Warwick, Rasmussen, Ludvigsen, & Cook, 2018). After all, the innovation of any educational technology needs to be transformed from possibility to reality to benefit education’s stakeholders.

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13 CLASSROOM DIALOGUE AND STUDENT ATTAINMENT Distinct roles for teacher-led and small-group interaction? Christine Howe, Sara Hennessy and Neil Mercer

Introduction Unsurprisingly given its title, the concept of ‘dialogic education’ typically revolves around the patterns of classroom dialogue that are believed to promote positive student outcomes. The patterns have been widely discussed, with several recurrent themes. One such theme stresses a need for open questions rather than closed (e.g. Alexander, 2008; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Nystrand, Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser, & Long, 2003; O’Connor, Michaels, & Chapin, 2015; Wells & Arauz, 2006). A second theme emphasizes extended contributions, with participants building on or elaborating previous contributions from themselves or others (e.g. Alexander, 2008; Boyd & Markarian, 2011; O’Connor et al., 2015; Rojas-Drummond, Littleton, Hernandez, & Zuniga, 2010; Wells & Arauz, 2006). A further theme highlights the acknowledging, probing, or critiquing of differences, ideally supported with the reasons upon which opinions are based (e.g. Alexander, 2008; Chinn & Anderson, 1998; Howe & Mercer, 2007; Lefstein, 2010; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Mortimer & Scott, 2003; Osborne, Erduran, Simon, & Monk, 2001; Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013; Schwarz, 2009; Wilkinson et al., 2017). A fourth theme encompasses explicit links amongst contributions and attempts to co-ordinate (e.g. Alexander, 2008; Kumpulainen & Lipponen, 2010; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008; Osborne et al., 2001; Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013). A fifth relates to the adoption of a meta-cognitive perspective, where participants evaluate their own dialogue against standards of good practice (e.g. Lefstein, 2010; Mercer & Dawes, 2008; Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013; van der Veen, de Mey, van Kruistum, & van Oers, 2017). Finally, a theme that cuts across those mentioned already is that all participants should contribute to ensuring classroom dialogue displays the supposedly productive patterns, implying high involvement from students as well as teachers (Alexander, 2008; Clarke, Xu, & Wan, 2010; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Muhonen, Pakarinen, Poikkeus, Lerkkanen, & Rasku-Puttonen, 2018; Nystrand et al., 2003; Richter & Tjosvold, 1980). This is not to say that every proponent of dialogic education endorses every theme. Scholars vary over which themes they emphasize, not necessarily because they reject the others but sometimes because of differing interests. Occasionally, they also augment and subdivide within themes (e.g. Chin, 2007; Webb et al., 2009). Equally, it is not to imply that only proponents of 182

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dialogic education endorse the themes. The concept of dialogic education emerged in the late twentieth century, arguably pioneered in Freire’s analysis of ‘dialogical teaching’ (e.g. Freire & Macedo, 1995). However, around 70 years earlier, both Piaget and Vygotsky pinpointed reasoned critique as supportive of growth (see translations published as Piaget, 1959; Vygotsky, 1998). Furthermore, there is no suggestion that the concept reduces to patterns of dialogue. The broader classroom ethos is often also emphasized, specifically its commitment to openmindedness, mutual respect, freedom from censure, reduced role division, and space to explore (e.g. Boyd & Markarian, 2011; Freire & Macedo, 1995; Haneda & Wells, 2008; Matusov, 2009; Wegerif, 2013). Nevertheless, dialogue undoubtedly plays a pivotal role within the concept; indeed, it would be misnamed should dialogue not prove important. Moreover, even if not universally endorsed, the themes highlighted previously feature prominently amongst contemporary analyses.Thus, it seems crucial to establish whether patterns of dialogue consistent with the themes are truly productive, and in focusing upon attainment outcomes this is the issue that our chapter addresses. We start with a brief review of previous research, arguing that the evidence relating to group work amongst students is stronger than that relating to interactions involving teachers. We then summarize a recent study that focuses upon teacher–student dialogue while also obtaining data relating to group work. From the results, we conclude that although dialogue is relevant to attainment in both contexts, there may be variation over which patterns are critical.

Background research The consequences for student attainment of the dialogue that occurs during group work amongst students have been studied in genuine classroom settings and also in settings where students work out-of-class on curriculum-relevant tasks. Examples of classroom-based research can be found in Anderson, Howe, Soden, Halliday, and Low (2001), Fung and Howe (2014), Howe et al. (2007), Jurkowski and Hänze (2015), Mercer, Dawes, Wegerif and Sams (2004), Mercer and Sams (2006), and Reznitskaya et al. (2009). Instances of out-of-class research include Asterhan and Schwarz (2009), Azmitia and Montgomery (1993), Damon and Phelps (1988), Howe (2009), Howe and Zachariou (2019), Miell and MacDonald (2000), Schwarz, Neuman, and Biezuner (2000), and Williams and Tolmie (2000). Research in both settings is important, the former in the interests of authenticity and the latter because non-dialogic influences on attainment are more readily identified and factored out. In fact, regardless of setting, the expression and reasoned discussion of differences has emerged as a powerful stimulus to student growth. For instance, in the classroom-based studies of Anderson et al. (2001) and Fung and Howe (2014) students worked together in small groups over ten lessons on the design of projects, later writing individual reports about project implementation. Report quality was strongly predicted by the frequency of reasoned differences during group discussion. In around 30 outof-class studies (many summarized in Howe, 2009; Howe & Mercer, 2007; Howe & Zachariou, 2019), conceptual and procedural growth in science and mathematics were found to be strongly associated with reasoned discussion of differences. The studies covered a wide age range (midprimary to tertiary), group-sizes from pairs to four plus, computer- and workbook-presented tasks, and a broad assortment of topics. The power of reasoned discussion during group work is so strong that it scarcely matters whether students resolve their differences while working together, let alone jointly reach target insights or solve problems correctly (see again Howe, 2009; Howe & Zachariou, 2019). On the contrary, progress can occur post-group (sometimes many weeks afterwards) as students reflect on the uncertainties that dialogue stimulates. This said, reasoned discussion is not the only theme amongst those listed earlier to receive support from dialogue during group work. 183

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First, the emphasis that proponents of dialogic education place upon linkage and co-ordination has also been endorsed. Specifically, studies conducted in out-of-class settings have detected positive associations between referring back to preceding activities or dialogue and eventual student attainment (e.g. Howe, Tolmie, Duchak-Tanner, & Rattray, 2000; Howe, Tolmie, Greer, & Mackenzie, 1995). At present though, the relevance of referring back in authentic classrooms remains to be demonstrated (Howe et al., 2007). Second, the extended Thinking Together program that Mercer and colleagues have designed and implemented (e.g. Mercer et al., 2004; Mercer & Sams, 2006) indicates that adopting a meta-cognitive perspective can strengthen the impact of reasoned dialogue. Integral to the positive findings was awareness of good practice achieved through the negotiation and display of such ‘ground rules’ as ‘We give reasons to explain our ideas’ and ‘If we disagree, we ask why’. While her research is very small-scale, Muneer (2014) detected positive consequences from the meta-cognitive perspective stimulated when students watched video-recordings of their group interaction and reflected on how the dialogue measured against ground rules. Thus, three of the themes detailed earlier have been examined in the context of group work amongst students, and in one case at least positive implications are beyond doubt. However, group work is not the modal activity in classrooms, being at best a minority enterprise and virtually unknown in some cultures (Howe, 2010). The main axis of interaction is between teachers and students, and the relevance of the themes to teacher–student dialogue seems less certain. This is not because of shortage of research addressing such dialogue. There have been hundreds of studies relating to this topic, and approximations to the themes under discussion have often been taken as models of effective practice. However, as Howe and Abedin (2013) note in a comprehensive review, the models’ effectiveness is frequently presumed rather than tested, with the focus upon the extent to which teacher–student dialogue is model-compliant. For that reason, student attainment has seldom been assessed, let alone related to dialogue. Moreover, even when attainment has been examined, interpretation is rarely compelling. It is not unusual to find studies that measure attainment and whose procedures have been implemented through dialogue, but do not analyze dialogue or occasionally even record it (e.g. Adey & Shayer, 2015; Trickey & Topping, 2004). Furthermore, even when attainment and dialogue have both been assessed, isolating the effects of teacher–student interchanges can be challenging. For instance, a significant number of studies revolve around broad programs that target task design and/or group work amongst students as well as teacher–student dialogue (e.g. Alexander, Hardman, & Hardman, 2017; Herrenkohl, Palincsar, DeWater, & Kawasaki, 1999; Larrain, Howe, & Freire, 2018; Osborne, Simon, Christodoulou, Howell-Richardson, & Richardson, 2013; Ruthven et al., 2017). Thus, even when such studies approach dialogue in a fashion that concurs with the themes and detect positive associations with student attainment (as some but not all do), the contribution from teacher–student dialogue remains unclear. At the same time, it would be misleading to suggest that the impact of teacher–student dialogue is completely uncharted. Nystrand et al. (e.g. Applebee, Langer, Nystrand, & Gamoran, 2003; Nystrand, 2006) highlight the potential relevance to attainment of open questions and high student involvement, with the findings relating to involvement echoed in Clarke et al. (2010) and Muhonen et al. (2018). Benefits for academic attainment and also for communicative competence have been reported when teachers build on or elaborate students’ ideas and encourage them to do the same, or do such things while also encouraging students to explain and justify their ideas (Muhonen et al., 2018; O’Connor et al., 2015; van der Veen et al., 2017). Pauli and Reusser (2015) report positive associations between attainment in mathematics and what they term ‘co-constructive talk’, which includes reasoned justification. Yet while these studies are encouraging, they remain exceptional. They do not, for instance, approach the ­number 184

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endorsing reasoned discussion during group work amongst students. Moreover, sample sizes are often small, the range of attainments is typically limited, and with several aspects of dialogue sometimes addressed simultaneously it can be unclear whether all or only some aspects are productive. It was recognition of these limitations that motivated the study we summarize next, for it attempts both to discriminate amongst contrasting aspects of teacher–student dialogue and to examine the implications for a broad range of attainment outcomes.

Key procedures We provide full details of the study in Howe, Hennessy, Mercer, Vrikki, and Wheatley (2019), where we explain that, partly in the interests of authenticity, an observational design was employed.Teacher–student dialogue was recorded during routine lessons, dialogue was analyzed in a fashion that bears upon the themes detailed previously, and analyzed dialogue was related to student attainment. Recordings were made in 72 primary school classrooms, all located in England but covering a wide geographic area (i.e. urban vs. rural, north vs. south). In 65 classrooms, the students were exclusively from Year 6 (i.e. aged 10 to 11 years),Year 6 being the final year of primary schooling in England, and in seven classrooms they were composited from Years 5 and 6. The classrooms were socio-economically and ethnically diverse (0–100% of students per class eligible for free school meals; 0–96% from minority ethnic backgrounds). Recordings were made via an unobtrusively positioned video camera, with one microphone attached to the teacher and another for ambient sound. Initially, three complete lessons were recorded in each classroom, covering at least two subjects from mathematics, science, and literacy. However, analyses conducted when two-thirds of the classrooms had been visited indicated that dialogue indices computed from two lessons almost perfectly predicted indices computed from three, so long as the lessons covered different school subjects. Thus, to expedite data collection and analysis, two lessons only were recorded thereafter, and when three lessons had previously been recorded only two were analyzed. All pairs of lessons covered different subjects and averaged 130.81 minutes recording in each classroom (range: 60 to 204 minutes). Amongst studies of classroom dialogue, progress during dialogue itself is sometimes taken as indicative of positive outcomes. However, as intimated earlier, research into group work amongst students demonstrates that such progress can be a poor proxy for eventual growth. While the situation with teacher–student dialogue may be different, we decided it would be safest, given the current state of knowledge, to target longer-term progress directly and assess the students individually some months after their classrooms were recorded. We addressed educationally relevant attitudes as well as attainment, but due to space limitations, attitudinal measures are not covered in this chapter (but see Howe et al., 2019). Three of the five attainment measures were the Standard Assessment Tests (SATs), which the Year 6 students took about two months after the final recording. SATs are government-prepared, teacher-administered, timed tests, which address mastery of prescribed curricula in: a) Mathematics; b) Grammar, punctuation, and spelling (commonly known as SPAG); c) Reading. They have major implications for schools in England since performance tables are published, with consequences for reputation and resourcing. It was in fact the desirability of including measures that policymakers and hence schools regard as highly significant that motivated our focus upon Year 6. In the event, we obtained (government-produced) SAT scores relating to 68 classrooms, with scores standardized within the range 80 to 120. With Reading and SPAG all scores were usable, but with Mathematics, scores from seven classrooms had to be discounted as someone other than the recorded teachers had provided substantial amounts of teaching. Table 13.1 indicates the range of mean scores across the classrooms, together with overall sample statistics. 185

Christine Howe, Sara Hennessy and Neil Mercer Table 13.1 Mean attainment scores across classrooms Variable

Student N

Student mean (SD)

Range of class means

Reading SAT SPAG SAT Mathematics SAT Science Test Reasoning Test

1,751 1,754 1,573 1,103 1,778

105.09 (8.35) 106.26 (7.49) 104.59 (7.09) 13.99 (4.42) 24.01 (5.33)

95.28 to 112.78 98.62 to 113.93 97.92 to 113.28 10.29 to 21.07 18.96 to 30.24

The remaining attainment measures covered science and general reasoning. There had once been a SAT in science, but by the time of our study this was no longer the case.Therefore, sourcing items from the UK government’s sample assessments and the research literature, we prepared our own test. The test’s conceptual component addressed inheritance and evolution, this being the curriculum-specified topic that more teachers anticipated covering than any other when asked early in the year. Its procedural component revolved around the recognition and design of fair tests and the drawing of conclusions from test data. The reasoning test was also specially prepared, for while there are many published tests of reasoning, few seemed suitable for our study’s age group. Our test covered: a) facts and opinions, e.g. indicate whether ‘The weather in Britain is awful’ is a fact or an opinion; b) reasons and conclusions, e.g. underline the conclusion in ‘Teaching is the best job in the world.You get to know lots of young children and help them learn new things … ’; c) saying and implying, e.g. ‘The explorer says “To survive we must drink this water”. What does the explorer imply?’, with response options of ‘The water is clean’, ‘We can’t survive without drinking the water’, and ‘The water is delicious’; d) comparison of reasons, where two characters give reasons for some viewpoint, e.g. about keeping children in at lunchtime when they misbehave, and the task includes judging whether one reason repeats or differs from the other or is relevant or irrelevant to the viewpoint. Like SATs, the science and reasoning tests were timed assessments and limited to Year 6 students (i.e. not Year 5 in the composite classes), but as regards administration teachers were offered the options of researcher- or teacherpresentation. All but five opted for teacher-presentation, so materials were normally dispatched to the schools shortly after completion of SATs with administration procedures detailed. The reasoning test was completed in all 72 classrooms, but the science test was restricted to the 44 classes that had studied inheritance and evolution. With maximum possible scores of 40 (reasoning test) or 33 (science test), performance data for the sample are presented in Table 13.1. Central to the study was the aim of relating teacher–student dialogue to student attainment, but it would have been inappropriate to focus exclusively on dialogue and attainment. First, relationships would have been un-interpretable unless earlier performance was considered. Accordingly, each classroom was visited shortly after the start of the school year (some weeks before recordings began), and each Year 6 student completed the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) reading test (see www.nfer.ac.uk/schools/nfer-tests), suitable for end of Year 5 or start of Year 6, or the NFER mathematics test. (To minimize demand, no student completed both.) Baseline performance was computed as class means across: a) NFER mathematics scores for analyses relating to Mathematics SAT; b) NFER reading scores for analyses relating to SPAG and Reading SATs; c) NFER mathematics and reading scores combined for analyses relating to science and reasoning. Second, positive dialogue-attainment relationships could be misleading unless analyses controlled for the confounding influence of additional factors that were simultaneously related to dialogue and attainment. Dealing with this issue was not 186

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straightforward because confounding factors had not previously been itemized in the literature, perhaps in part because teacher–student dialogue does not readily lend itself to the out-ofclass investigation associated, as noted earlier, with group work. However, after sifting through relevant reports, we identified 32 potential confounds, primarily covering student demographics, student attitudes and prior attainment, parental involvement, and a wide range of teacher practices.The latter included, of course, teachers’ use of group work. All 32 factors were assessed through student or teacher questionnaires or from observations made during recorded lessons or when analyzing the recordings subsequently. Most potential confounds could be discounted due to lack of variation across the 72 classrooms, lack of association with variation in key aspects of dialogue, or lack of association with variation in attainment.The factors that remained related to prior student attainment and attitudes and to the quality of group work, so it was these factors that were included in the major analyses.

Teacher–student dialogue We analyzed all sequences of dialogue involving teachers, no matter whether these occurred with the whole class, small groups, or individual students. Contributions from teachers and students were both examined. Analysis included coding each turn (identified via speaker switch) using a 13-category scheme adapted from Hennessy et al. (2016) rating each lesson holistically using five three-point scales. Jointly, ten turn-level categories addressed four of the themes listed earlier, i.e. open questions, extended contributions, reasoned discussion, and linkage and co-ordination. The other three categories captured non-dialogic behavior. The two remaining themes, meta-cognition and student participation, were addressed via rating scales. For purposes of analysis, category frequencies were summed across the two lessons sampled from each classroom, with totals corrected for varying lesson lengths. Ratings were also summed across the two lessons. Three of the five categories relating to linkage and co-ordination were used with such low frequency that they had to be dropped, and when meta-cognitive behavior was only observed in 11% of lessons, data from the scale that addressed this were also unusable. Furthermore, when the summed frequencies for each of the remaining categories were compared across classrooms: a) student and teacher frequencies for each category were found to be so highly correlated with each other that the student–teacher distinction could be ignored; b) the frequencies of invitations to elaborate or to reason (both open questions) emerged as so closely correlated with, respectively, the frequencies of elaborated or reasoned statements that the invitation–statement distinction was likewise unnecessary. Ultimately, the 11 ‘indices of dialogicality’ listed in Table 13.2 remained for inclusion in subsequent analyses. From the range of mean frequencies shown in the table, it is clear the values for each index varied substantially across classrooms. We used multi-level modeling to examine dialogue–attainment relations, taking account of baseline performance and also including the appropriate confounding factors from those identified previously. With eight indices of dialogicality, no positive associations with attainment were detected. Moreover, with science and reasoning, no positive associations were detected with any indices. However, with Mathematics SATs there were statistically significant interactions between ratings for Student Participation and the frequencies of Elaborated dialogue, t(67.48) = 3.40, p = 0.001, and Querying, t(66.08) = 2.21, p = 0.03. The picture with SPAG SATs was similar, with ratings for Student Participation interacting with the frequencies of Elaborated dialogue, t(76.13) = 1.98, p = 0.052, and Querying, t(74.95) = 2.00, p = 0.049. In all cases, the interactions signaled that when levels of Participation were high, high levels of Elaborated and Querying were associated with relatively high SAT scores, suggesting that these combinations 187

Christine Howe, Sara Hennessy and Neil Mercer Table 13.2 Indices of dialogicality Turn-level codes Elaborated Reasoned Elaborated/Non-Dialogic Ratio Reasoned/Non-Dialogic Ratio Querying Referring Back Referring Widely

Class mean (SD) range** Building on/elaboration/clarification invited 205.72 (78.04) 85.99 or provided to 430.30 Explanation/justification invited or provided 153.09 (50.91) 64.33 to 280.31 Total non-dialogic divided by total Elaborated 3.93 (1.85) 1.58 to 9.35 Total non-dialogic divided by total Reasoned 5.32 (2.68) 1.37 to 14.01 Doubt, disagree, challenge, question, or reject 40.95 (19.95) 9.51 to 86.90 Cites prior contribution or shared knowledge 6.09 (4.55) 0 to 26.24 Links to wider context outside classroom 3.62 (3.31) 0 to 17.01

Summarized definition*

Lesson-level rating scales

Coverage*

Aims Monitoring Reflection Student Participation

Lesson goals, plans, objectives Monitoring/guidance of student learning Reflection on learning process Multiple students engage with others’ ideas

Class mean (SD) range** 1.81 (0.74) 0 to 4 3.24 (0.90) 1 to 4 1.36 (1.26) 0 to 4 2.46 (1.07) 0 to 4

Notes: *For details, see Vrikki, Wheatley, Howe, Hennessy, & Mercer (2018); **Based on corrected frequencies or ratings, summed across two lessons per classroom

were productive. With low levels of Participation, the levels of Elaborated and Querying were unrelated to SAT scores. Moreover, when levels of Elaborated and Querying were low, the levels of Student Participation were also irrelevant. While the results with SAT Reading were not statistically significant, they point in the same direction. To achieve the highest rating on the Student Participation scale, there had to be evidence for the students expressing ‘their ideas publicly at length in whole-class situation and group work’ and in doing so, ‘engaging with each other’s ideas’. Recognizing this, extracts (1) and (2) can be interpreted as what, from the study’s results, constitutes productive teacher–student dialogue, for in both cases there is evidence for elaboration [E], querying [Q], and for contributions that are consistent with high ratings for participation. Extract (1) comes from a biology lesson, and extract (2) relates to de La Mare’s poem The Listeners. (1) Reptiles Gillian: Eddie: Oliver: Ian: Gillian:

We did about reptiles. Here are the key characteristics: don’t regulate body temperature, cold-blooded. Most lay eggs with leathery shells [E]. Tough scaly skin [E]. And the exceptions are snakes, because they have like smooth scaly skin and it’s not as tough, and adders, which are a type of snake and they give birth to like live snakes, not eggs [E]. 188

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Teacher: Yes they do.Yes Mark? Mark: There’s just one small thing wrong with it [Q]. Frances: The key characteristics that were wrong were that they had feathers, which they don’t because they have tough scaly skin [E]. And they don’t breathe underwater using internal gills for gas exchange [E]. (2) The Listeners Ellie:

Teacher: Imogen:

Teacher: Imogen: Teacher: Imogen:

There was one thing I just came up with. So it’s that he’s gone because he’s promised. He got to stay there and make a promise and then he went, like he went on a kind of quest like to complete the promise but then more time has passed than he thought, and there were live people in the house before, like an inn and lots of people, and now it’s kind of a small broken hut with phantoms in it [E]. And he comes back and he finds it like that and what’s happened. Do you know I really like your back story […] Yes Imogen? Well I think similar to Ellie but not [Q]. So it was an inn and he went to go and stay there once, and he went somewhere, like for a few years. And then he came back and they’d all turned into ghosts because it was haunted [E]. I’ve kind of got two theories [E]. I don’t know like, this is kind of like from a story that I’ve already read. That’s brilliant, you’re linking it to other things you’ve read or seen, definitely. […] the house killed the people inside [E]. Oh my gosh, that’s awful. And the other one is that they just died [E].

Group work In contrast with the positive picture obtained for Elaborated, Querying, and Participation, the results relating to reasoned dialogue between teachers and students were not encouraging. None of the attainment measures came close to displaying significant, positive relations with the Reasoned variable or the Reasoned/Non-Dialogic Ratio. Yet, as documented already, reasoned dialogue is an established facilitator of progress after group work amongst students, and there was in fact every reason to think it was operating similarly within our study. Group work was not our focal concern but, as noted, we recognized it as a potential confound in analyses of teacher–student dialogue, and therefore we assessed its quality so this could be factored out. In particular, whenever a teacher asked the students to work independently in small groups during the recorded lessons, a researcher chose one group at random and, following procedures adapted from Howe et al. (2007), evaluated the group’s interaction. Employing time-sampling techniques (ten seconds per minute preparation, 20-seconds observation, ten-seconds recording on grids, 20-seconds rest), the researcher noted usage of key features of dialogue, such as elaboration, disagreement, and justification. Noted features were then used to rate the group (1 = Not true, 2 = Partly true, 3 = Very true) on the scales listed as G5 to G9 in Table 13.3. The remaining scales were used to rate more general aspects of group functioning. The two researchers who, across the classes, observed group work had been carefully trained with the techniques and during training comparisons were made of how they independently rated previously recorded samples. They achieved 81% agreement, conventionally regarded as highly acceptable (Miles & Huberman, 1994). During the present study, the researchers 189

Christine Howe, Sara Hennessy and Neil Mercer Table 13.3 Quality of group work scales G1 G2 G3 G4 G5 G6 G7 G8 G9 G10

All pupils were involved in the group work interactions Groups do not split into sub-groups There was a significant amount of pupil–pupil on-task talk Pupils showed a positive attitude towards working together in a group Group interaction involved sharing and building on each other’s ideas Group interaction involved justified reasoning Group interaction involved constructive evaluation of each other’s ideas Pupils tried to reach consensus or compromise Group work involved productive discussion and/or conflict Group work roles were not detrimental to pupil group working

stayed with the same group over very short sequences of group work punctuated by dialogue with teachers, and their ratings applied across the whole sequence. Otherwise, they moved to different groups for each group-work session to maximize representativeness. A total of 386 sessions of group work was observed across the 144 lessons, with each session lasting between 1 and 42 minutes (M = 6.47 minutes).The number of sessions per lesson ranged from zero to eight, but only eight lessons were devoid of group work. These latter lessons were awarded ratings of 1 on each of the ten scales, but otherwise the actual ratings were used in assessing quality. Essentially, the mean rating per scale was calculated across the sessions within each lesson, producing 20 mean ratings per classroom (ten ratings for each of two lessons). Principal components analysis showed these 20 ratings all to be loaded on a single primary component (explaining 53% of the variance), and Cronbach’s alpha across ratings was 0.90. Thus, a simple index of quality seemed warranted, specifically the overall mean rating per classroom across the 20 scale means. Paralleling teacher–student dialogue, values on the quality index were positively associated with scores on Mathematics and SPAG SATs (respectively, t(59.08) = 2.60, p = 0.012 and t(68.50) = 2.33, p = 0.023), but unlike teacher–student dialogue they were also positively associated with scores on the reasoning test, t(72.88) = 2.53, p = 0.014. Of course, these associations do not themselves guarantee a contribution from reasoned dialogue: some of the scales listed in Table 13.3 address alternative aspects of group functioning. However, G6, G7, and G9 are directly relevant and ratings on these three scales were: a) highly inter-correlated (rs = 0.87 to 0.99); b) uniquely loaded on a second component emerging from the principal components analysis (explaining 19% of the variance) as well as on the primary component. Moreover, 84% of the variance in overall quality scores was explained through G4 plus the combined effect of G6, G7, and G9.This is why we believe that reasoned dialogue contributed to the positive effects of group work, while seemingly having no relevance to interaction with teachers.

Discussion Teacher–student interaction was of course our study’s focus, with our over-arching aim being to examine the themes that dominate contemporary conceptions of dialogic education. In the event, little can be said about two of these themes: there was insufficient variation across the relevant rating scale to address the adoption of a meta-cognitive perspective, and three of the five coding categories relating to linkage and co-ordination were too low frequency to be analyzed. The other two categories (Referring Back and Referring Widely) were examined, with no positive consequences detected. However, when these were only two categories amongst five, strong conclusions would be inadvisable. By contrast, the remaining themes could be addressed, with 190

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many encouraging messages about teacher–student dialogue. Invitations to elaborate are inherently open, and since the Elaborated index encompasses such invitations, its positive association with SAT scores endorses the relevance of open questions. At the same time, this association is also self-evidently consistent with the expectation that participants elaborate and build on previous contributions. A third theme includes the acknowledgement, probing, and critique of differences. Querying bears on acknowledgement and probing, and its frequency was also positively associated with SAT scores. Finally, any benefits from Elaborated dialogue and Querying were contingent upon high levels of Student Participation during teacher–student interaction, supporting the notion that all participants should contribute fully. Of course, the apparent benefits from dialogue were not universal, for none of the teacher– student indices were associated with scores on the science test, nor in fact was the quality of group work amongst students. The latter finding is perhaps particularly surprising, given the large number of studies alluded to earlier that show reasoned dialogue during group work to predict attainment in science. In Howe et al. (2019), we propose several explanations for our results relating to science, all calling upon non-dialogic factors such as low motivation due to science’s removal from Year 6 SATs.We suggest, therefore, that denying dialogue a role with science would be premature; rather the key message may be that dialogue’s impact is context-dependent, and the context in England that currently surrounds science is non-conducive. None of the teacher–student indices were associated with success on the reasoning test either, but this time the quality of group work did seem to matter, and reasoned dialogue was strongly implicated. Indeed, reasoned dialogue almost certainly also lay behind the positive relation between quality of group work and SAT scores.When Piaget and Vygotsky spotlighted reasoned dialogue nearly a century ago (see again Piaget, 1959;Vygotsky, 1998), they attributed particular significance to usage during group work. They recognized that in that context, reasons typically occur when positions are justified, and anticipating much subsequent and supportive research, they regarded the consequent juxtaposition of own ideas with possibly (but not necessarily) superior alternatives as powerful stimuli to reflection, comparison, and growth. In other words, they would have seen merit in extract (3), also cited in Howe and Mercer (2007), where 10- to 11-year-olds predict the speeds with which toy vehicles will roll down slopes that are supported on pegs. Reasons for predictions [R] abound. (3) Rolling Speed Jonathon: Well, the lorry’s heavier, and it gives more [R]. See, like it pulls down like. If it’s light, it just moves down in its own time, but if it’s got a lot of things it’ll make it go faster [R]. Also it’s on the higher peg [R]. Anna: But say it was like going down a water slide, and there was a great, big, heavy person getting down [R]. Chung: That’s different. Skin’s different to rubber, and you slide down on water [R]. Anna: I know, but cars are metal [R]. Chung: It’s rolling on paper [R], so the lorry’ll hit it and it’ll stop. But it’s got weight to push it in the start, so I think it’ll go faster [R]. Recognizing exchanges like extract (3) as the impetus to growth after group work carries two potentially important implications for our results relating to teacher–student dialogue. First, it may help to explain why the levels of Elaborated, Querying, and Student Participation in the teacher–student context did seem to matter, for as extracts (1) and (2) illustrate, the consequence of high levels of these variables was, once more, the juxtaposition of each student’s 191

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ideas with possibly (but not necessarily) superior alternatives. Unlike extract (3), the ideas in extracts (1) and (2) did not constitute reasons, but by virtue of juxtaposition the conditions for reflection, comparison, and growth were arguably created. Second, the group work data may also clarify why, as regards teacher–student dialogue, the levels of reasoned dialogue seemed immaterial. The levels certainly varied: Table 13.2 shows a very broad range with the Reasoned variable and the Reasoned/Non-Dialogic Ratio (see Vrikki et al., 2018, for analysis of category frequency). Moreover, sequences could be detected where several students voiced contrasting reasons. However, as illustrated in extract (4) from a lesson on rational number (with reasons highlighted via [R]), the merits of contrasting ideas were seldom left uncertain during teacher– student dialogue and therefore worthy of comparative reflection; on the contrary, the teachers typically made it very clear which ideas were to be favored: (4) Rational Number Teacher: Boys there were some hands up over here, have you thought about justifying your answer? Johnny: Err yeah. We think it might be ‘hundredths’. Teacher: Okay, a hundredth? Why a hundredth? Johnny: Because it fits in [R]. And it’s kind of to do with decimals [R]. Teacher: Okay, who is feeling brave then? Who’s willing to make a mistake for the rest of the class? Or who thinks they can justify their answer and maybe they’re correct - who knows? Go on Nick. Nick: Hundredth. Teacher: Hundredth? Okay and your justification please? Nick: Because it fits in the boxes [R]. Teacher: Nick! Do we have a different justification please? Nick, listen carefully young man. Carl please? Carl: Cos it says ‘this place value’ [R]. Teacher: Okay.That’s a good place to start Carl, that’s a great place to start - we know we’re after the name of a place value. How could we further that justification? Rebecca? Rebecca: Is it when you have like the decimal and you have to convert it into hundredths because percent is out of a hundred [R]? Teacher: Okay, because percent is out of a hundred and that links directly. If it’s out of one hundred, a hundred is the denominator, which means we’re dealing in hundredths. That’s a good justification. In principle, the teacher in extract (4) could have collected reasons from all four students without immediate comment and invited reflection, thereby creating a scenario akin to extracts (1), (2), and (3). Our coding scheme contained a category that would have captured this, but it was amongst the three that were dropped through low frequency. It applied to 17 turns within the 78,391 we analyzed, and most of these turns involved students explaining to their teachers what they had discussed amongst themselves. This is not to suggest that teacher-orchestration is impossible here, yet it could be challenging: a classroom-based intervention that aspired amongst other things to boost teachers’ linkage of reasons (Ruthven et al., 2017) resulted in frequencies that were not substantially higher than what we observed. Perhaps though, this is not where effort is best expended. Our study identified alternative aspects of teacher–student dialogue, captured via the Elaborated, Querying, and Student Participation variables, that seem reason192

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ably promising as regards student attainment and that, when some classrooms already display these variables with high frequency, are clearly more natural for teachers than linkage of reasons. Maybe then, it is these variables that should become the focus when addressing teacher–student dialogue, while also recognizing that sequences like extract (3) where reasons are used productively can emerge readily and naturally during group work amongst students. In other words, it may prove helpful to identify the optimal patterns that can be achieved naturally within the two contexts (elaboration, querying, and high participation for teacher–student and reasoned dialogue for group work) and take steps to promote their complementary occurrence.

References Adey, P., & Shayer, M. (2015).The effects of cognitive acceleration. In L.B. Resnick, C.S.C. Asterhan, & S.N. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 127–140). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Alexander, R. (2008). Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk. Cambridge: Dialogos. Alexander, R., Hardman, F., & Hardman, J. (2017). Changing talk, changing thinking. Interim Report from the In-house Evaluation of the CPRT/UoY Dialogic Teaching Project. Retrieved from www. robinalexander.org.uk Anderson, A., Howe, C., Soden, R., Halliday, J., & Low, J. (2001). Peer interaction and the learning of critical thinking skills in further education students. Instructional Science, 29, 1–32. Applebee, A.N., Langer, J.A., Nystrand, M., & Gamoran, A. (2003). Discussion-based approaches to developing understanding: Classroom instruction and student performance in middle and high school English. American Educational Research Journal, 40, 685–730. Asterhan, C.S.C., & Schwarz, B.B. (2009).Argumentation and explanation in conceptual change: Indications from protocol analyses of peer-to-peer dialogue. Cognitive Science, 33, 374–400. Azmitia, M., & Montgomery, R. (1993). Friendship, transactive dialogues, and the development of scientific reasoning. Social Development, 2, 202–221. Boyd, M.P., & Markarian, W.C. (2011). Dialogic teaching: Talk in service of a dialogic stance. Language and Education, 25, 515–534. Chin, C. (2007). Teacher questioning in science classrooms: Approaches that stimulate productive thinking. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 44, 815–843. Chinn, C.A., & Anderson, R.C. (1998).The structure of discussions that promote reasoning. Teachers College Record, 100, 315–368. Clarke, D., Xu, L.H., & Wan, M.E.V. (2010). Student speech as an instructional priority: Mathematics classrooms in seven culturally-differentiated cities. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2, 3811–3817. Damon, W., & Phelps, E. (1988). Strategic uses of peer learning in children’s education. In T. Berndt & G. Ladd (Eds.), Peer Relations in Child Development (pp. 135–157). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1995). A dialogue: Culture, language and race. Harvard Educational Review, 65, 377–402. Fung, D., & Howe, C. (2014). Group work and the learning of critical thinking in the Hong Kong secondary liberal studies curriculum. Cambridge Journal of Education, 44, 245–270. Haneda, M., & Wells, G. (2008). Learning an additional language through dialogic inquiry. Language and Education, 22, 114–136. Hennessy, S., Rojas-Drummond, S., Higham, R., Márquez, A.M., Maine, F., Ríos, R.M., …, & Barrera, M.J. (2016). Developing a coding scheme for analysing classroom dialogue across educational contexts. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 9, 16–44. Herrenkohl, L.R., Palincsar, A.S., DeWater, L.S., & Kawasaki, K. (1999). Developing scientific communities in classrooms: A sociocognitive approach. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 8, 451–493. Howe, C. (2009). Collaborative group work in middle childhood: Joint construction, unresolved contradiction and the growth of knowledge. Human Development, 52, 215–239. Howe, C. (2010). Peer Groups and Children’s Development. Oxford: Blackwell. Howe, C., & Abedin, M. (2013). Classroom dialogue: A systematic review across four decades of research. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43, 325–356. Howe, C., Hennessy, S., Mercer, N., Vrikki, M., & Wheatley, L. (2019). Teacher-student dialogue during classroom teaching: Does it really impact upon student outcomes? The Journal of the Learning Sciences. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/10508406.2019.1573730

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Christine Howe, Sara Hennessy and Neil Mercer Howe, C., & Mercer, N. (2007). Children’s social development, peer interaction and classroom learning. The Primary Review (Research Survey 2/1b). Cambridge: University of Cambridge. Howe, C.,Tolmie, A., Duchak-Tanner,V., & Rattray, C. (2000). Hypothesis testing in science: Group consensus and the acquisition of conceptual and procedural knowledge. Learning and Instruction, 10, 361–391. Howe, C., Tolmie, A., Thurston, A., Topping, K., Christie, D., Livingston, K., … , & Donaldson, C. (2007). Group work in elementary science: Towards organisational principles for supporting pupil learning. Learning and Instruction, 17, 549–563. Howe, C., & Zachariou, A. (2019). Small-group collaboration and individual knowledge acquisition: The processes of growth during adolescence and early adulthood. Learning and Instruction, 60, 263–274. Howe, C.J., Tolmie, A., Greer, K., & Mackenzie, M. (1995). Peer collaboration and conceptual growth in physics: Task influences on children’s understanding of heating and cooling. Cognition and Instruction, 13, 483–503. Jurkowski, S., & Hänze, M. (2015). How to increase the benefits of cooperation: Effects of training in transactive communication on cooperative learning. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 85, 357–371. Kumpulainen, K., & Lipponen, L. (2010). Productive interaction as agentic participation in dialogic enquiry. In K. Littleton & C. Howe (Eds.), Educational Dialogues: Understanding and Promoting Productive Interaction (pp. 48–63). London: Routledge. Larrain, A., Howe, C., & Freire, P. (2018). ‘More is not necessarily better’: Curriculum materials support the impact of classroom argumentative dialogue in science teaching on content knowledge. Research in Science and Technological Education, 36, 282–301. Lefstein, A. (2010). More helpful as problem than solution: Some implications of situating dialogue in classrooms. In K. Littleton & C. Howe (Eds.), Educational Dialogues: Understanding and Promoting Productive Interaction (pp. 170–191). London: Routledge. Matusov, E. (2009). Journey into Dialogic Pedagogy. New York: Nova Science. Mercer, N., & Dawes, L. (2008). The value of exploratory talk. In N. Mercer & S. Hodgkinson (Eds.), Exploring Talk in School (pp. 55–71). London: Sage. Mercer, N., Dawes, R., Wegerif, R., & Sams, C. (2004). Reasoning as a scientist: Ways of helping children to use language to learn science. British Educational Research Journal, 30, 367–385. Mercer, N., & Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking: A Sociocultural Approach. London: Routledge. Mercer, N., & Sams, C. (2006). Teaching children how to use language to solve maths problems. Language and Education, 20, 507–528. Michaels, S., O’Connor, C., & Resnick, L.B. (2008). Deliberative discourse idealized and realized: Accountable talk in the classroom and civic life. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27, 283–297. Miell, D., & MacDonald, R. (2000). Children’s creative collaborations: The importance of friendship when working together on a musical composition. Social Development, 9, 348–369. Miles, M.B., & Huberman, A.M. (1994). Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook (2nd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mortimer, E.F., & Scott, P.H. (2003). Meaning Making in Science Classrooms. Buckingham: Open University Press. Muhonen, H., Pakarinen, E., Poikkeus, A-M., Lerkkanen, M-K., & Rasku-Puttonen, H. (2018). Quality of educational dialogue and association with students’ academic performance. Learning and Instruction, 55, 67–79. Muneer, R. (2014). Enhancing collaborative group interactions through video-simulated group processing among primary students. Unpublished MPhil dissertation, University of Cambridge. Nystrand, M. (2006). Research on the role of classroom discourse as it affects reading comprehension. Research in the Teaching of English, 40, 392–412. Nystrand, M., Wu, L.L., Gamoran, A., Zeiser, S., & Long, D.A. (2003). Questions in time: Investigating the structure and dynamics of unfolding classroom discourse. Discourse Processes, 35, 135–198. O’Connor, C., Michaels, S., & Chapin, S. (2015). ‘Scaling down’ to explore the role of talk in learning: From district intervention to controlled classroom study. In L.B. Resnick, C.S.C. Asterhan, & S.N. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 111–126). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Osborne, J., Erduran, S., Simon, S., & Monk, M. (2001). Enhancing the quality of argument in school science. School Science Review, 82, 63–70.

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Classroom dialogue and student attainment Osborne, J., Simon, S., Christodoulou, A., Howell-Richardson, C., & Richardson, K. (2013). Learning to argue: A study of four schools and their attempt to develop the use of argumentation as a common instructional practice and its impact on students. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 50, 315–347. Pauli, C., & Reusser, K. (2015). Discursive cultures of learning in (everyday) mathematics teaching: A video-based study on mathematics teaching in German and Swiss classrooms. In L.B. Resnick, C.S.C. Asterhan, & S.N. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 181–193). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Piaget, J. (1959). Judgment and Reasoning in the Child. Michigan: Littlefield Adams. Reznitskaya, A., & Gregory, M. (2013). Student thought and classroom language: Examining the mechanisms of change in dialogic teaching. Educational Psychologist, 48, 114–133. Reznitskaya, A., Kuo, L-J., Clark, A-M., Miller, B., Jadallah, M., Anderson, R.C., & Nguyen-Jahiel, K. (2009). Collaborative reasoning: A dialogic approach to group discussions. Cambridge Journal of Education, 39, 29–48. Richter, F.D., & Tjosvold, D. (1980). Effects of student participation in classroom decision making on attitudes, peer interaction, motivation, and learning. Journal of Applied Psychology, 65, 74–80. Rojas-Drummond, S., Littleton, K., Hernandez, F., & Zuniga, M. (2010). Dialogical interactions among peers in collaborative writing contexts. In K. Littleton & C. Howe (Eds.), Educational Dialogues: Understanding and Promoting Productive Interaction (pp. 128–148). London: Routledge. Ruthven, K., Mercer, N., Taber, K.S., Guardia, P., Hofmann, R., Ilie, S., … , & Riga, F. (2017). A researchinformed dialogic-teaching approach to early secondary school mathematics and science: The pedagogical design and field trial of the epiSTEMe intervention. Research Papers in Education, 32, 18–40. Schwarz, B.B. (2009). Argumentation and learning. In N.M. Mirza & A-N. Perret-Clermont (Eds.), Argumentation and Education:Theoretical Foundations and Practices (pp. 91–126). Dordrecht: Springer. Schwarz, B.B., Neuman,Y., & Biezuner, S. (2000).Two wrongs may make a right … . If they argue together! Cognition and Instruction, 18, 461–494. Trickey, S., & Topping, K. (2004). Philosophy for children: A systematic review. Research Papers in Education, 19, 365–380. van der Veen, C., de Mey, L., van Kruistum, C., & van Oers, B. (2017). The effect of productive classroom talk and metacommunication on young children’s oral communicative competence and subject matter knowledge: An intervention study in early childhood education. Learning and Instruction, 48, 14–22. Vrikki, M.,Wheatley, L., Howe, C., Hennessy, S., & Mercer, N. (2018). Dialogic practices in primary school classrooms. Language and Education. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/09500782.2018.1509988 Vygotsky, L. (1998). The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky. Volume 5: Child Psychology. New York: Plenum Press. Webb, N.M., Franke, M.L., De, T., Chan, A.G., Freund, D., Shein, P., & Melkonian, D.K. (2009). ‘Explain to your partner’: Teachers’ instructional practices and students’ dialogue in small groups. Cambridge Journal of Education, 39, 49–70. Wegerif, R. (2013). Dialogic: Education for the Internet Age. London: Routledge. Wells, G., & Arauz, R.M. (2006). Dialogue in the classroom. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 15, 379–428. Wilkinson, I.A.G., Reznitskaya, A., Bourdage, K., Oyler, J., Glina, M., Drewry, R., … , & Nelson, K. (2017). Toward a more dialogic pedagogy: Changing teachers’ beliefs and practices through professional development in language arts classrooms. Language and Education, 31, 65–82. Williams, J., & Tolmie, A. (2000). Conceptual change in biology: Group interaction and the understanding of inheritance. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 18, 625–649.

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14 DISTINCTIVELY DEMOCRATIC DISCOURSE IN CLASSROOMS Susan Jean Mayer, Catherine O’Connor, and Adam Lefstein

Introduction There exists an inherent tension within contemporary discussions of dialogic pedagogies (e.g., Alexander, 2001, 2005, 2008; Mercer & Littleton, 2007) between eliciting and exploring students’ divergent understandings and means of expression, on the one hand, and teaching them to think in culturally recognized terms, on the other. How are democratic educators to make sense of this tension—particularly within countries with institutionalized legacies of racialized prejudice and oppression? What might it mean for teachers to explore with interest their students’ original and unfamiliar constructions, outlooks, and understandings? Through what forms of pedagogical and methodological processes might a generative balance between classroom convergence and divergence be imagined, enacted, and studied? Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, 1986), widely cited as a central inspiration for dialogic pedagogies, was a literary theorist and philosopher: the implications of his thoughts on dialogue for classroom practice are therefore by no means obvious. A contemporary of Lev Vygotsky’s, Bakhtin shared with him an organizing orientation toward the cultural mediation of human meaning, and the two theorists are often cited in relationship within socio-cultural works of educational theory that speak of dialogic pedagogies. Yet Bakhtin (1984, 1986) and Vygotsky (1978, 1986) were not colleagues, and, as Wegerif (2013) has previously discussed, their concerns diverged considerably. Although also a literary theorist early in his life, Vygotsky is primarily known today for his psychological research and theorizing. In a time of great cultural upheaval and transformation, Vygotsky was interested in the processes through which traditional rural peoples and children facing physical and mental challenges might learn to think in what he viewed as culturally advanced ways. He sought to learn how to acculturate all people to modern understandings and modes of thought, which he viewed as a pathway to their social and political liberation. Vygotsky therefore reflected at length on what might be entailed in meeting and understanding other minds and in moving them toward culturally recognized understandings in an authentic manner. It is worth noting for our purposes that Vygotsky read Piaget’s early works in the field and grasped the significance of Piaget’s methodological move toward querying children sensitively and attending closely to their actions and thinking processes (Vygotsky, 1986, 196

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pp. 12–13)—even though, again, the focal concerns of these two scholars diverged. In a sense, Vygotsky built upon Piaget’s methodological concern with accessing the divergent manner in which children (and, in Vygotsky’s case, others) conceptualize and reason about the world. Vygotsky sought to extend Piaget’s insights in a pedagogical direction, as represented by his notion of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). As young scholars, both Vygotsky and Piaget lived and worked at a time of considerable optimism regarding the potential of modern life to lift the conditions of poor and marginalized peoples. Neither focused upon, nor perhaps even considered, the resistance that some people/s might experience to gaining access to what Vygotsky and Piaget thought of as increasingly universal forms of modern thought. Similarly, neither theorist specifically focused on the pedagogical challenges of nurturing an individual student’s unique sense of self in the world, a process the contemporary philosopher Gert Biesta calls subjectification (more on this next). A century later, concerns about the threats that common school practices can pose to the identities of culturally and racially marginalized students have gained prominence. Many scholars have studied and theorized the potentially debilitating repercussions of what are seen as culturally hegemonic patterns of interaction among teachers and students within classrooms (e.g., Banks, 1996; Banks & Banks, 2004; Sleeter, ed. 2007; Noguera, 2003). Intellectually disempowering patterns of practice are seen as widespread within the U.S. context, for example, and as sustained by a culture of “settled expectations” (Harris, 1993). As a construct, the notion of settled expectations helps to “articulate and problematize entrenched, usually hidden, boundaries that tend to control the borders of acceptable meanings and meaning-making practices … [and that have] shaped deficit-oriented discourses about students from non-dominant communities” (Bang, Warren, Rosebery, & Medin, 2012, p. 303). Classroom discourse researchers who focus on such issues today continue to find Vygotsky and those who have advanced his work relevant, as contemporary constructions of this tradition explicitly theorize the role that cultural forms such as discourse always assume in both perpetuating and interrupting oppressive assumptions and patterns. As others have also noted, however, neo-Vygotskian thought naturally retains something of the impetus driving Vygotsky’s modernist ambitions. In contrast, Bakhtin’s emphasis on divergence and difference can be seen as resonating more profoundly with contemporary sensibilities about the cultural and contextual rootedness of all human understanding. Regarding this contrast, Wegerif (2013) has argued that Vygotsky thought in dialectical terms, while Bakhtin thought dialogically. As Wegerif put it, Bakhtin speaks of difference as “constitutive of meaning in such a way that it makes no sense to imagine ‘overcoming’ this difference … [while] Vygotsky interprets differences as ‘contradictions’ that need to be overcome or transcended” (Wegerif, 2013, p. 347). Wegerif also cites the following thought from Bakhtin, which suggests just how vehemently Bakhtin opposed viewing dialectical processes as superior to the situated dialogues of embodied people within their lived circumstances: Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness— and that’s how you get dialectics. (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 147; cited in Wegerif, 2013, p. 350) Wegerif goes on to say that these two stances, the dialogic and the dialectic, “imply incompatible assumptions about meaning” (ibid, p. 359). From a certain perspective, this makes sense: clearly, they are based on different assumptions about meaning and truth. 197

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Indeed, in some respects, these contrasting stances can be seen to represent and embody a conundrum continually faced by teachers. We have heard many teachers voice frustration with the complexity of this very challenge: supporting all students in acquiring what is considered the canonical knowledge in their various academic fields while at the same time respecting and developing the voices of each student across profoundly diverse backgrounds and understandings. As Rosebery, Ogonowski, DiSchino, & Warren (2010, p. 357) point out, this represents a central concern for those who value Bakhtinian heterogeneity of knowledge, of language, and of reasoning: On the one hand, the current state of educational policy suggests that mounting serious efforts to take up heterogeneity as foundational to learning will be difficult at best. On the other hand, if our goal is to understand, theorize, and represent learning and development in ways that reflect and mobilize the rich diversity of human experience, ignoring heterogeneity is not an option. Here we employ recent work of Gert Biesta (2010, 2014) to position these seemingly opposed sets of purposes as complementary aims within a more capacious notion of democratic pedagogical purposes. As discussed next, we follow Dewey in characterizing distinctively democratic purposes as those that aim to foster each student’s agency and participation in social and civic life.We are proposing that the Vygotskian and Bakhtinian stances characterized by Wegerif need to be brought into dynamic relationship if distinctively democratic patterns of knowledge construction are to flourish within classrooms. We begin by outlining Biesta’s (2010, 2014) three dimensions of democratic educational experience—qualification, socialization, and subjectification—as resources for this exploration (cf. Lamm’s [1976] distinction between acculturation, socialization, and individuation). We then draw upon related work that classroom practitioners, ethnographers, and discourse analysts have undertaken over the past 40 years in order to envision and reflect upon potential paths forward.

Discursive diversity as a distinguishing feature of democratic classrooms By “distinctively democratic” classroom discourse practices we mean practices that strive to position all students as creative thinkers and capable collaborators in the construction of shared classroom understandings.The philosopher John Dewey (1929/2013, 1938, 1944) is well known for theorizing the dynamic transaction between individual and cultural purposes that underwrites his conception of democratic pedagogical practice. Since Dewey’s day, this defining dynamic has been further developed by numerous philosophers and educational theorists; here we draw primarily upon the work of two—Gert Biesta and Maxine Greene. As an educational philosopher of the mid-20th to early 21st centuries, Greene (1988, 1995) focused on the complex ways in which entrenched patterns of cultural exclusion and alienation threaten Dewey’s vision of democratic school practice. In particular, Greene explicated the challenges that racism and other forms of oppression pose to realizing caring and intellectually generative relationships within contemporary U.S. schools and addressed the kinds of intervention she found most promising. Throughout her work, Greene emphasized the indispensable part that querying, attending to, and learning from one’s students must assume in the work of transcending racial and cultural barriers in the classroom. Both Biesta (2006, 2010, 2014) and Greene (1988, 1995) have drawn on the political philosopher Hannah Arendt in their philosophical investigations of what might be involved in learning to act responsibly in a world of human difference. As a Jewish scholar who fled the Holocaust as 198

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a young woman, Arendt repeatedly returned to the question of how people might learn to live with human difference within pluralistic nation states. Greene, who taught at Teachers College in New York City, also brought her experience as a progressive pedagogical theorist and teacher educator to bear in addressing this question. She spoke of how, in providing opportunities for students to learn from each other, one creates openings for them to view and to understand each other in new ways. As one of us has noted: Throughout her work, Greene challenged democratic educators to care about the lived experiences and worldviews of others and so to move beyond the boundaries of their familiar ways of perceiving and understanding the world. Greene saw such openings as creating opportunities, not just for growing as an individual, but also for collaboratively constructing new social realities within schools and beyond. (Mayer, 2017, p. 9) Related concerns regarding the potentially oppressive consequences of culturally limited teaching practices have informed classroom discourse research since its earliest years. For example, in the U.S., anthropologists, linguists, and educators collaborated in the study of the ways in which culturally mainstream teachers neglected to recognize and to build upon the diverse literacies of North American and Pacific indigenous children and youth (e.g., Au, 1979; Dumont, 1972; Erickson & Mohatt, 1982; John, 1972; Philips, 1972; Watson-Gegeo & White, 1990). In another key study, Shirley Brice Heath (1983) conducted a micro-analytic ethnographic exploration of the ways in which the patterns of language use within racialized and economically impoverished communities in the Southeast U.S. provided strengths and capacities that were not recognized as strengths by mainstream teachers. These studies were enabled by diverse traditions in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics—most notably, but not exclusively, Gumperz and Hymes’ (1972) integration of ethnography and sociolinguistics, which Gumperz (2003) called “interactional sociolinguistics.” These early efforts foreground the prominent place that ethnographic perspectives and tools have assumed in research related to exclusionary patterns of language use in classrooms. Before long, educators interested in the study of classroom language began to integrate the ideas of Vygotsky (1978, 1986) in order to engage more deeply with questions of learning and human development in a manner that continued to recognize and address the organizing influences of cultural resources and forms of activity (e.g., Cazden, 2001; Mehan, 1979; Nystrand, Gamoran, Kachur, & Prendergast, 1997; Lemke, 1990; Wells, 1999). Today, related forms of research are primarily identified as “socio-cultural” or “social-historical” in order to mark their moorings within Vygotskian and neo-Vygotskian concepts of learning and development (e.g., Lee & Smagorinsky, 2000; Sannino, Daniels, & Gutierrez, 2009; Wertsch, Del Rio, & Alvarez, 2017; Tharp & Gallimore, 1991). Many contemporary educational researchers who address questions of social and cultural inclusion locate their work within these conceptual frameworks; among them are some who focus specifically on the positive representation and pedagogical integration of students’ home cultures within schools (e.g., Lee, 2007; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). To this concern with the cultural dimensions of classroom learning environments, some sociocultural theorists have noted the need for a complementary attention to individual activity and response. As James Wertsch (1995, 1998), among others, has argued, sociocultural activity theory needs to address the relationship between cultural activity and individual response at both the theoretical and empirical levels. While the sociocultural identities and relative positionings of teachers and students are clearly matters for attention and concern, the work of positioning all 199

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students as creative and capable participants in the work of any classroom requires that consideration also be given to each individual’s subjective quality of experience. Multiple dimensions of teacher and student subjectivities are always active in determining the quality of their academic engagements and relationships.

Diverse subjectivities and Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic Research on patterns of classroom engagement now often references dialogic discourse practices, emphasizing Bakhtinian constructs (1981, 1984, 1986) while also drawing upon Vygotskian concepts of learning (e.g., Alexander, 2001, 2005, 2008; Boyd & Markarian, 2011, 2015; Flecha, 2000; Frankel, 2012; Hess & McAvoy, 2015; Matusov, 2009; Mercer & Littleton, 2007). As discussed previously, however, it is important to distinguish between various dimensions of the pedagogical practices that have been termed “dialogic.” Here in particular, we are distinguishing between a concern with 1) apprenticing students into the discursive practices associated with the various academic disciplines and 2) exploring and valuing the intellectual contributions and perspectives of every member of a classroom. As suggested previously, teachers who are committed to fostering classroom dialogue and collaborative knowledge construction processes can feel, at times, caught between these two orientations. While we are interested in viewing these perspectives as related, and perhaps also mutually supporting, the relationship between them is not self-evident. Any political system (from school districts to national governments), whether democratic or not, may take an interest in teaching students—especially those viewed as most academically promising—to think like scientists or mathematicians, for example.As some research is now demonstrating, dialogic discourse practices can support the work of acculturating students to the established methods, modes of thought, and practices of different academic fields (e.g., Howe, Hennessy, Mercer, Vrikki, & Wheatley, 2019; Littleton & Howe, 2010; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; O’Connor, Michaels, & Chapin, 2015, inter alia).Yet an interest in acculturating (some) students to the purposes, approaches, and mores of existing academic fields does not necessarily imply a focus on empowering all students to experience themselves as valued members of an intellectual community. Nor would it necessarily speak to the potential learning opportunities presented by social, cultural, and intellectual diversity among students and the challenges involved in realizing such opportunities. As discussed previously, Bakhtin viewed such diversity as essential for creating new meanings and understandings. Bakhtin did not believe that human thought and consciousness could be authentically represented in what he called monologic terms. On the contrary, he spoke of polyphonic representations of diverse perspectives as essential to the emergence of all meaning. Bakhtin believed that only multiple distinct perspectives, joined in authentic dialogic relation, could represent truth and bring new understandings into the world. It is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses, one that cannot in principle be fitted into the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to speak, by its very nature full of event potential and is born at a point of contact among various consciousnesses. (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 81, emphasis in original) Teaching with the aim of dialogically engaging students across their various dimensions of human difference—of orchestrating what we here call polyphonic encounters—has been shown to enrich and complicate classroom discussions in valuable ways (as discussed briefly next). Yet such encounters will generally require a meaningful investment of classroom time and the 200

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willingness to embrace a more uncertain, contingent, and curious quality of classroom transaction. Ultimately, they also require a willingness to learn to live, not only with difference, but also with paradox and contradiction—a considerable challenge given that most classroom teachers are expected, particularly in these times, to focus on fostering their students’ reliable grasp of canonical content knowledge, often in over-crowded classrooms with serious time constraints. Polyphonic encounters remain somewhat diffuse by their very nature—as much as new conceptual alignments and concurrences may develop. Not all contested matters will find resolution; an authentic consensus will not always be achieved. As the philosopher Alexander Sidorkin put it, in discussing Bakhtin’s notion of polyphonic truths: the distinctive voices of the polyphonic truth do not merge and do not come to consensus.Yet they are organized around each other, as double stars circle an empty center. In less metaphorical terms, it means that the voices must achieve a state when they are truly and fully addressed to each other. (Sidorkin, 1999, p. 30) Polyphonic encounters are seen, then, as moving toward emergent rather than preconceived outcomes. Scott’s four classes of communicative approach (2008) offers a useful point of contrast. Scott’s analysis of classroom discourse into interactive and non-interactive enactments of both dialogic and authoritative discourse generates his four classes, one of which is interactive/dialogic. In Scott’s conception, however, interactive/dialogic discourse, in which “teachers and students consider a range of ideas” (p. 21), is seen as a phase of a more complicated discursive sequence, which is aimed at bringing students into an authentic appreciation of canonical content understandings—what Scott refers to as “scientific understandings,” following Vygotsky’s usage. During polyphonic encounters, in contrast, unanticipated insights and new understandings are nurtured within an ultimately non-authoritative discursive context: teacher authority is employed to maintain the quality of the intellectual exchange rather than to scaffold students’ understanding in any particular direction. All discussants are authorized to collaborate on the construction of new understandings on their own terms based on their own experiences, beliefs, and interpretive frameworks. Discussions are therefore likely to range considerably further afield and will not necessarily result in everyone viewing matters more or less in the same way. For this reason, such encounters can feel misdirected to classroom teachers focused primarily on the promulgation of canonical understandings and modes of thought. (And even if the classroom teacher finds polyphonic encounters of value, school administrators may not share this view— one of the many overlooked challenges of teaching in this way.)

A multidimensional conception of democratic pedagogical purposes Biesta (2014) has proposed that the active nurture of what he terms processes of subjectification be recognized as one defining dimension of his tripartite conception of democratic pedagogical practice. In Biesta’s extension of Dewey, processes of subjectification require that teachers strive to support all of their students in becoming intellectually independent and responsible “subject[s] of action” (Biesta, 2014, p. 64). In order to do so, teachers must sustain a sense of their students as unique individuals, in the process of developing their individual voices and relationships with the world. Again, Dewey (1938, 1944) argued that democratic pedagogical practice distinguishes itself through the dynamic balance it seeks to establish between nurturing the intellectual authority and agency of each student and acculturating all students to shared values, commitments, and practices. Following Dewey, progressive practitioners have long viewed pedagogical transactions 201

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that today might reliably be characterized as dialogic (Mayer, 2014) as critical to realizing this vision. Contemporary philosophers of democratic education continue to theorize the value of drawing out and attending to the personal insights and individual perspectives of students (e.g., Burbules, 1993; Haroutunian-Gordon, 2009). In contrast, Vygotsky’s notion of the ZPD and the later, related concept of scaffolding can arguably be seen to reinforce a traditional emphasis on moving students toward established academic norms and understandings, albeit in a more sensitive and attuned manner. From this perspective, dialogic relations are discussed in terms of their usefulness in advancing various pedagogical aims—perhaps mathematical reasoning, or literary interpretation—rather than as an essential feature of all democratic relations (Sidorkin, 1999). The following characterization of dialogic teaching from Mercer and Littleton, for example, reflects this emphasis. Dialogic teaching is that in which both teachers and pupils make substantial and significant contributions and through which children’s thinking on a given idea or theme is helped to move forward. (Mercer & Littleton, 2007, p. 41) Certainly, Mercer and Littleton are right to suggest that democratic schools are charged with teaching the young to think and act in culturally recognized and powerful ways. Such purposes are represented within the remaining two of Biesta’s three dimensions of democratic pedagogy, qualification and socialization (Biesta, 2010). In Biesta’s words, qualification “has to do with the ways in which education qualifies people for doing things,” and socialization has to do with “the ‘insertion’ of newcomers into existing orders” of various kinds (2014, p. 129). The orders Biesta has in mind here include everything from various professional cultures to cultural projects such as social, moral, and environmental education. As ongoing research continues to suggest, learning to listen at greater length and to respond more sensitively to students can be seen to support all three sets of Biesta’s pedagogical aims. For whether a teacher is focusing more, in a given moment, on scaffolding a student’s enactment of a valued academic practice or is struggling to understand that student’s creative contribution during open inquiry, a receptive and responsive pedagogical stance promises to prove useful. Complex questions can therefore be seen to arise regarding the manner and spirit in which a given teacher has attended and responded to a particular student in a given encounter and to what end/s she or he may have done so. At this point, it becomes clear that even with Biesta’s clarifying framework, considerable work remains to be done in terms of exploring how one might enact, study, and theorize various configurations and interpenetrations of the Vygotskian and Bakhtinian forms of classroom meaning-making described previously. Some suggestive work has been undertaken within individual research studies; much more remains to be done, both in terms of additional empirical work and in terms of effectively synthesizing the various research approaches that have been developed. Next, we review a handful of such studies and point to some of their salient features.

Implications for classroom practice and research Returning to the guiding questions with which we began, what might it mean for teachers to explore with interest their students’ divergent perspectives and understandings within the context of classroom work with shared purposes? Through what pedagogical and methodological practices might a generative interplay between classroom convergence and divergence be imagined, enacted, and studied, in view of the larger democratic goals we have discussed previously? 202

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Pedagogical practices A number of established and experimental pedagogical practices (e.g., Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008;Warren, Ballenger, Ogonowski, Rosebery, & Hudicourt-Barnes, 2001; Ballenger, 1998, 2009; Carini, 2001; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Duckworth, 2001, 2006; Michaels & O’Connor, 2012; Rosebery et al., 2010) have been designed specifically to support teachers in eliciting and exploring students’ personal assumptions, experiences, and forms of reasoning on a student’s own terms. In addition, several approaches to teacher professional development, such as Lesson Study (e.g., Dudley, 2013) and Math Labs (Kazemi et al., 2018) provide the potential for deep reflection on student subjectivities in the context of shared teacher reflection. While external studies of such practices have not necessarily focused on the tensions we are considering here, capable enactments of these practices have provided rich environments for studying the nuances involved in attending to diverse student voices.This was demonstrated, for example, in the collaborative process between practitioners and external researchers through which the complex move revoicing was first identified as significant and studied (O’Connor & Michaels, 1993). As it turns out, many of these listening-oriented teaching practices are grounded in traditions of child study originally pioneered by developmental psychologists such as Piaget and Vygotsky and those who worked with them (e.g., Daniels, 2008; Ginsburg, 1997; Mayer, 2005). They can be seen, as a group, as forms of teacher research or teaching research as they draw on methods originally designed to study children’s thinking and learning. Such practices enable teachers to observe their students’ learning in real time and to reflect upon it based upon written or taped records of classroom exchanges. They can also clearly support the work of interested researchers (see Ballenger & Rosebery, 2003). By probing their students’ unfamiliar ideas and forms of reasoning with genuine curiosity and without evaluation, teachers can create the conditions for polyphonic encounters within their classrooms. They can acquire skills for transforming “puzzling” (Ballenger, 2004) or even troubling episodes into learning opportunities for all. As Biesta (2014) has argued, certain guiding democratic values and habits of mind can only be practiced within encounters that challenge participants to recognize and respect enduring differences of belief and perspective. The institution of schooling provides educators with the opportunity to orchestrate such encounters. Indeed, basic democratic commitments to the principles of evidence and to cogent and fair-minded reasoning can arguably be advanced in a more convincing fashion when students are challenged to wrestle meaningfully with the uncertainties born of conflicting perspectives. As researchers bring these commitments to specific content areas (e.g., Windschitl & Calabrese Barton 2016), we can observe more closely the complex interplay between concerns about academic content “coverage” and concerns about discursive receptivity and respect within subject matter discussions.

Classroom research As classroom discourse researchers have long demonstrated, ethnographically informed, microanalytic approaches to data collection and analysis can represent the kinds of complex transactions that Biesta and many others would view as fostering “processes of subjectification” or as nurturing the developing voices of all. Again, these studies do not necessarily address the interplay between the two orienting perspectives we have discussed here. Many of them focus on situations wherein more sensitive attention to individual student voices appears warranted. For example, in a study of the widespread activity of “sharing time” in early elementary school, 203

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Michaels (1981) drew on Gumperz’s interactional sociolinguistic framework to explore some of the ways in which children’s culturally distinct narrative styles appeared either to facilitate or obstruct their access to early literacy, depending on their alignment with the primarily White middle-class teachers they would encounter. Other studies have demonstrated the ways in which some students can move to marginalize their racialized and less affluent peers even when the teacher is intentionally orchestrating periods of “open discussion” in the interest of supporting all student voices. Classroom interactions in one master teacher’s sixth grade class provide detailed examples of affluent White sixth graders critiquing the proposals of students of color, despite the fact that the activity is explicitly structured to encourage heterogeneous and creative approaches to the focal activity (O’Connor, 1996; Godfrey & O’Connor, 1995; and O’Connor, Godfrey, & Moses, 1998). Even an accomplished teacher’s skilful efforts to orchestrate polyphonic encounters will not necessarily preclude some students from attempting to assert learned patterns of sociocultural and racial dominance. In related work, Segal and Lefstein (2016) show that democratizing pressures to promote pupil participation and voice in Israeli primary schools can result in “exuberant voiceless participation.” In this discourse form, pupils actively and sometimes even exuberantly participate in the discussion, but at the level of voice wherein they rarely contribute their own ideas, which are even more rarely taken up and responded to by others. Building on Bakhtin (1986), Blommaert (2006), and Hymes (1996), Segal and colleagues argue that observing who is (and is not) talking in class is insufficient; rather, they draw attention to whose ideas are being expressed, in what ways, and how they are heeded and taken up by others. In related studies, they show how voices do emerge, on the margins of the curriculum, in struggles among students (Segal, Lefstein, & Pollak, 2018) and how a teacher’s well-meaning attempts to elicit student voices can perversely take the form of a public confession in which the teacher’s voice is dominant (Segal et al., 2018). Such studies highlight nuanced questions regarding conditions of entry (Brown et al., 1993; Erikson, 1982; Lampert, 2001; Lemke, 1990) and matters of discursive positioning. In their second published analysis of the multi-faceted move they termed revoicing, O’Connor and Michaels (1996) drew on the notion of participant framework, a lens first proposed by Goffman (1974, 1981) and further developed by Goodwin (1990). Analyses of participant frameworks focus on the ways in which interlocuters are positioned in relation to topics and utterances and how they are socially situated in relation to each other. Such analyses can thereby ground close consideration of each speaker’s purpose, position, authorship, and opportunity, which is required if researchers are to locate and study the questions of subjective experience and understanding implicated by Bakhtin. A participant framework analysis also directs attention toward the various ends to which a teacher may have chosen to employ a multidimensional move such as revoicing. During a revoicing, the teacher repeats or rephrases what a student has just said and then asks the student whether the teacher’s characterization of the student’s utterance is accurate. As the researchers learned, experienced teachers might make this move for any number of reasons (see also diSessa, Greeno, Michaels, & O’Connor, 2015). Most of the analyses cited previously share a micro-analytic focus that resides typically at the level of an utterance. Discursive moves that teachers may use to support Biesta’s subjectification for their students, such as revoicing or “press for reasoning,” are merely tools—they may be used with or without a commitment to supporting all students’ meaningful engagement (e.g., Snell & Lefstein, 2018). There is no “talk tool” capable of resolving the Bakhtinian–Vygotskian tension that Wegerif points to and that we have argued is central to distinctively democratic teaching. Yet a commitment to fostering each student’s authority and agency in the world requires that teachers sustain a commitment to recognizing and engaging this tension. 204

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Conclusion As we have suggested, within pluralistic democratic societies, nuanced questions related to voice and to cultural interpretation and positioning are omnipresent within social and cultural contexts of every kind, including classrooms. As Biesta (2014), among others, has argued, democratic schools distinguish themselves as settings within which even sensitive human differences might be constructively explored and people might learn to recognize and understand each other across those differences. While such outcomes can never be assured, certain forms of discursive openings must be made available for such encounters even to be possible. And educational practitioners and researchers will need to attend in particular ways if they hope to extend our understanding of these delicate forms of interpersonal encounter. The work of studying and remediating exclusionary or inequitable discursive practices within schools implicates everything from the patterns of classroom knowledge construction employed to the character of teacher authority expressed to the means available for addressing specific forms of academic challenge within diverse school cultures. Multiple relevant dimensions of practice must therefore be placed into thoughtful relation in order to characterize classroom interactions with adequate clarity, nuance, and perspective. As we have argued, among these dimensions, researchers will need to consider the manner in which, and the extent and ends to which, divergent student voices have been welcomed into the conversation within different classroom cultures. Within our increasingly fractious cultural zeitgeist, when even the values of truth and evidence are questioned, democratic educators—and the researchers who work with them—are challenged to engage with this complexity in the interest of enhancing the quality of the intellectual encounters that unfold within schools. As we have proposed, the generative relationship that Dewey first theorized between individual thriving and the common good implies a need for classroom practices designed to attend to divergent voices, even when confusing or potentially disruptive to the disciplinary content. At the same time these classroom practices must also serve to give all students access to established understandings and practices. A teacher’s successful negotiation of the tension implied between personally held understandings and those held more broadly can provide all members of a classroom with opportunities to feel seen and accepted. And it is through such recognition that historically marginalized students are most likely to be drawn into the work and life of their schools and the broader societies they represent. Yet as suggested previously, the difficulty of carrying out this work against the backdrop of time and resource pressures means that it cannot be construed as the responsibility of teachers alone. Systemic supports will be necessary to permit teachers to explore a generative balance between classroom convergence and divergence, for the benefit of all students.

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SECTION III

Dialogue, teachers and professional development

DIALOGUE, TEACHERS AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Riikka Hofmann

While research highlights the benefits of dialogic teaching and learning, it has been found ­difficult to change classroom practice to involve more discussion of students’ ideas (Osborne, Simon, Christodoulou, Howell-Richardson, & Richardson, 2013; Ruthven et al., 2017). This section discusses this challenge. It is argued here that two new research directions are needed to address this challenge. Firstly, research needs to move from an over-emphasis on individual professionals and attend to the sociocultural and collective nature and institutional context of teachers’ work. Secondly, there has been a tendency to focus on practices and programmes of professional learning interventions (PLIs). Going forward, research needs to explain the generative mechanisms that can bring about change: we need to understand how PLIs have their effect and why they may or may not lead to professional change. Over the last decade there have been several reviews investigating effective professional development programmes (Borko, Jacobs, & Koellner, 2010; Cordingley, Bell, Rundell, & Evans, 2003; Cordingley et al., 2015; Muijs et al., 2014; Timperley, Wilson, Barrar, & Fung, 2007;Yoon, Duncan, Lee, Scarloss, & Shapley, 2007). Synthesising these reviews, some central dimensions become salient. Across the reviews, effective features of PLIs involve: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

A focus on how teachers learn A focus of professional learning on teaching, learning and students Teacher collaboration in a community of professional learners Making salient discrepant data and challenging problematic discourses and External expertise and support

I argue that all these features relate to dialogue. So dialogue is central to professional learning, but how? A number of key features have been identified as central for teacher professional learning through dialogue. Firstly, we need to make available to practitioners conceptual and discursive tools which can enable teachers address and re-interpret local challenges in their dialogues (cf. Hofmann, 2016). This is addressed in the chapter by Dudley and Vrikki, who argue in the context of Lesson Study that we need more sophisticated tools to help teachers and facilitators engage in forms of talk conducive to professional change.

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Secondly, we can support change in classroom dialogue through augmenting professional learning interventions through classroom teaching materials designed to be educative in the sense of supporting both teacher development and classroom activity (Ruthven & Hofmann, 2013).This is discussed by Miyazaki: pointing to the triadic relationship of teacher, students and learning materials, she illustrates how teaching materials are not only there for children to learn from them. Those materials and children’s dialogic engagement with them offers the teacher opportunities to learn from and about the children. Thirdly, teachers’ understanding of their students’ capabilities for learning dialogues is often a barrier to change towards more dialogic classroom practices, particularly in disadvantaged settings (Rainio & Hofmann, 2015; Hennessy, Hassler & Hofmann, 2016).This is discussed by Hennessy and Davies, who elaborate on the importance of teachers’ dialogic stance, involving an epistemological commitment towards the inclusion of student ideas, for enabling genuine dialogues in the classroom. The chapter by Reznitskaya and Wilkinson also highlights this, arguing that learning to conduct sustained dialogues in the classroom requires substantial shifts in teachers’ epistemic beliefs as well as practices. Teachers, they point out, need to develop epistemic cognition consistent with the norms of dialogic discourse. The chapter by Gröschner, Jähne and Klaß discusses the development of a new measure of teachers’ dialogic attitudes. Fourthly, lack of change in classroom practice has often been explained through a deficit model relating to teachers, assuming students are always willing and able to change although research has demonstrated that this is often not the case (Hofmann, 2016). Change efforts need to pay attention to students’ willingness and capability to change. This is discussed by Hennessy and Davies who emphasise the need to consider students’ motivation to engage in dialogue. Finally, an inevitable, yet under-researched, aspect of professional change is that it always involves risk-taking (Hofmann, 2016; Hofmann & Vermunt, 2017). This needs to be reflected in our professional development efforts as well as in professional dialogues, if those are to be conducive to change. Gröschner et al.’s discussion illustrates the challenge of taking risks as professional practitioners. Dudley and Vrikki emphasise that professional development and demands for pedagogic change are often associated with performance management and not conducive to risk-taking which professional learning that changes practice requires. Their chapter illustrates how professional dialogues can be framed and designed to offer safe learning spaces in which taking risks is acceptable, thereby facilitating the exploration of gaps and challenges in their understanding and practice. In summary, professional dialogues conducive to genuine change in thinking and practice require conceptual and discursive tools to support productive conversations about practice; educative teaching materials that can illustrate and scaffold the implementation of new dialogic practices in the classroom; attention to teachers’ expectations of students’ capability to learn and engage in dialogue and students’ capabilities and willingness to engage in new practices; and safe opportunities to take risks and examine challenges collaboratively. Designing professional learning interventions which incorporate these factors involves various challenges that the field needs to address. Research has found that visible modifications to discursive classroom practice do not automatically lead to genuine transformation in teaching and learning practice (Hofmann & Ruthven, 2018). This puzzle is reflected in the study by Reznitskaya and Wilkinson in which apparent discursive changes in the classroom were not associated with a change in teachers’ epistemic cognition. I suggest that this points to several directions for further research. To understand the mechanisms of change towards more dialogic practice, research needs to attend to the sociocultural norms affecting classroom discourse: changing pedagogic practice to incorporate conversations which take students’ ideas seriously requires the explicit development, and mutual appropriation, of new norms of interaction (Hofmann & Ruthven, 2018). This in 214

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turns requires a sociocultural perspective on professional development, since classroom norms are not only rooted in individual teachers’ practices but in wider educational and cultural norms and student expectations of those. As Gröschner et al. discuss, they are even influenced by teachers’ own schooling experiences. Changing such well-established norms requires explicit efforts, consolidation time and buy-in from all participants. Reznitskaya and Wilkinson discuss how professional development efforts often do not specifically focus on the norms involved in classroom dialogue and argumentation. Understanding the conditions for such change requires close-up examination of dialogic practice. Recent research has illustrated how the visible appropriation of dialogic classroom norms emphasising the importance of talk is not a sufficient condition for change. Our research has shown that dialogic norms are in fact multi-dimensional: seemingly the same dialogic norms (such as ‘Respecting others’ ideas’) can be enunciated in terms of multiple different underlying rationales of which only some engender genuine dialogic change of classroom practice (Hofmann & Ruthven, 2018). Therefore, establishing new norms may first require the new norm itself being made the object of the lesson activity. This also applies to professional dialogues themselves. The chapters in this section demonstrate how research needs to attend not only to changes in material pedagogic practice as the outcome of professional learning interventions but those professional dialogues themselves. We need to examine further the extent to, and ways in, which underlying norms and individual and collective assumptions relating to classroom talk and learning can be made visible, addressed and transformed in those conversations. Only by addressing these key issues can we begin to address the overall goals for research on professional learning, in other words how to achieve sustained change in practice and develop scalable interventions to support wider change and learning.

References Borko, H., Jacobs, J. & Koellner, K. (2010). Contemporary approaches to teacher professional development. In E. Baker, B. McGaw & P. Peterson (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Education (pp. 548–555). Oxford: Elsevier. Cordingley, P., Bell, M., Rundell, B. & Evans, D. (2003). The impact of collaborative CPD on classroom teaching and learning. Research Evidence in Education Library. Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre (EPPI-Centre): Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London. Cordingley, P., Higgins, S., Greany, T., Buckler, N., Coles-Jordan, D., Crisp, B., Saunders, L. & Coe, R. (2015). Developing great teaching: lessons from the international reviews into effective professional development. Teacher Development Trust. Hennessy, S., Hassler, B. & Hofmann, R. (2016). Pedagogic change by Zambian primary school teachers participating in the OER4Schools professional development programme for one year. Research Papers in Education, 31(4), 399–427. Hofmann, R. (2016). Leading professional change through research(ing): Conceptual tools for professional practice. In P. Burnard, T. Dragovic, J. Flutter & J. Alderton (Eds.), Transformative Professional Doctoral Research Practice. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Hofmann, R. & Ruthven, K. (2018). Operational, interpersonal, discussional and ideational dimensions of classroom norms for dialogic practice in school mathematics. British Educational Research Journal, 44(3), 496–514. Hofmann, R. & Vermunt, J.D. (2017). Professional development in clinical leadership: Evaluation of the Chief Residents Clinical Leadership and Management Programme. Faculty of Education Working paper no. 5, 12/2017. University of Cambridge. Muijs, D., Kyriakides, L., van der Werf, G., Creemers, B., Timperley, H. & Earl, L. (2014). State of the art–teacher effectiveness and professional learning. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 25(2), 231–256.

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Riikka Hofmann Osborne, J., Simon, S., Christodoulou, A., Howell-Richardson, C. & Richardson, K. (2013). Learning to argue: A study of four schools and their attempt to develop the use of argumentation as a common instructional practice and its impact on students. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 50(3), 315–347. Rainio, A.P. & Hofmann, R. (2015). Transformations in teachers’ discourse about their students during a school-led pedagogic intervention. The European Journal of Social and Behavioural Sciences, XIII(2), 1815–1829. Ruthven, K. & Hofmann, R. (2013). Chance by design: Devising an introductory probability module for implementation at scale in English early-secondary education. ZDM – The International Journal on Mathematics Education, Special Issue on Classroom-Based Interventions in Mathematics Education, 45(3), 409–423. Ruthven, K., Mercer, N., Taber, K., Guardia, P., Hofmann, R., Ilie, S., Luthman, S. & Riga, F. (2017). A research-informed dialogic-teaching approach to early secondary-school mathematics and science: the pedagogical design and field trial of the epiSTEMe intervention. Research Papers in Education, 32(1), 18–40. Timperley, H.,Wilson, A., Barrar, H. & Fung, I. (2007). Professional Learning and Development: A Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration. Wellington: Ministry of Education. Yoon, K.S., Duncan, T., Lee, S.W., Scarloss, B. & Shapley, K.L. (2007). Reviewing the evidence on how teacher professional development affects student achievement. Issues and Answers Report, REL 2007 (No. 033). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

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15 TEACHERS’ COLLABORATIVE DIALOGUES IN CONTEXTS OF LESSON STUDY Peter Dudley and Maria Vrikki

Introduction Lesson Study (LS) was developed in Japan in the 1870s and 1880s (Dudley, 2019) as a mechanism for developing, transferring and mobilising classroom practice as the country opened up to the world, modernised and established a state education system. It is based upon collaborative teacher enquiry into how to improve pupil learning by improving teaching and curriculum. In these enquiries teachers study the curriculum and teaching and learning sequences they currently use and also what is known about more effective approaches. They collaboratively plan, teach and observe ‘research lessons’ (RLs) in which they introduce new elements of practice or curriculum designed to improve pupil learning. In post-lesson discussions, they analyse the learning they observed in the research lesson and may then plan further research lessons. These take account of what they found about the way pupils responded to the newly introduced elements in order to improve the teaching or curriculum model further. Once they believe they have found something of note, which other professionals would benefit from, they pass on the newly found knowledge. Such collaborative, research-focused and semi-public approaches to practice-development by groups of teachers working in each others’ classrooms were relatively new when the Japanese model first became known in the West at the very end of the last century. In England most teachers’ experiences of teaching with a fellow professional in the classroom were associated with ‘performance management’ or external government inspection. Neither was conducive to the risk taking and sense making demanded by professional learning that changes practice (Dudley, 2015). During research lesson planning and post-lesson analysis, LS group members engage in discussions that have been observed to further their professional knowledge. These ‘professional dialogues’ taking place in safe learning spaces become powerful mechanisms for learning. In these discussions it is acceptable to take risks or to acknowledge gaps in one’s professional knowledge or experience. The LS discussions become a context for building collective knowledge by thinking together about pupils whose success in each RL is a joint endeavor, a goal shared by each member of the group with increasing passion. Teachers consistently identify the experience of participating in these discussions as the most distinctive and important aspect of

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LS and one that sets LS apart from other related models of professional learning such as peer or specialist coaching (Dudley, 2013). In this chapter we will explore the dialogic nature of LS discussions, focusing in particular on dialogue forms that promote professional learning.We will also explore the modes of analysis that have proved fruitful in revealing the learning occurring in these discussions and the nature of the forms of knowledge that are drawn upon and developed. This includes how dialogue can help to bring to the surface deeply hidden, tacit forms of practice knowledge only rarely seen in other forms of professional development, the absence of which, in other forms of professional development, can constrain.

Lesson Study model The Lesson Study model used in the studies referenced in this chapter was developed in the UK. This model was based upon the Japanese Lesson Study (JLS) with elements of its Chinese variant (CLS) (Dudley, 2012; Dudley et al., 2018;Vermunt,Vrikki, van Halem, Warwick, & Mercer, 2019). Takahashi and McDougal (2016) summarise the key elements of JLS as (i) joint teacher curriculum study or ‘kyouzai kenkyuu’ (of progression, both leading up to and following the unit); (ii) collaborative lesson design by the LS group (detailing critical features of the lesson or unit design and what we can learn from them); (iii) progress related to the school’s research theme and (iv) the next steps for future teaching. A fifth phase occurs when the ‘findings’ or what has been learned from the RLs are made public, for example when the new approach may be built into a ‘public lesson’ taught before invited guests. It is common in JLS for expert practitioners to join the LS group and that every public research lesson is attended by an expert ‘commentator’ who will join the discussion from a university or school district. While the JLS groups are planning and conducting their LSs, they work collaboratively. Often one person may take a lead in planning the RL and others will contribute in meetings or via email. That person will teach the RL while colleagues observe. A post-lesson discussion involving the whole group follows. The nature of the post-lesson discussion is strongly collaborative and focused on analysing how the lesson enabled pupils to learn and how future teaching or research lessons should benefit from this. The nature of the discussion in the public research lesson is usually more formal with each invited guest taking turns to ask questions of the teacher and LS group. These are followed by commentaries from the teacher, perhaps the school principal and by the local expert commentator. The Research Lesson Study (RLS) model developed in England (Dudley, 2012) includes some modifications introduced by co-developing teachers in the development pilot.These resulted from negative associations of lesson observation referred to previously and also because of the growing influence at the time (2003–2005) of socio-cultural learning models (Mercer, 1995), learning as participating in communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and growing understanding of the role that student perspectives can play in improving classroom learning (Rudduck, 1996). This culminated in the RLS design seen in Figure 15.1. This ‘Research Lesson Study’ model (Dudley, 2003) includes cycles of three RLs and the use of both ‘case pupils’ and pupil interviews. The three-RL cycle emerged from the consistent finding by LS groups in the pilot that the first RL revealed new features of their pupils as learners that frequently rendered aspects of the RL plan redundant and required a second attempt. (Usually these are sequential lessons with the same class but where parallel classes have similar lessons the approach can be used with the same RL in different groups.) The third RL is used to test out hypotheses emerging from the first two RLs before sharing the new practice-knowledge more widely. The three-RL cycle allows 218

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Figure 15.1 Research Lesson Study process. (source:  Dudley, 2014, p. 5).

interleaving of observation and reflective sense-making and thus promotes a dialogic approach to teacher learning. Five other innovative features of RLS that were designed and adopted in order to promote exploratory talk (Barnes & Todd, 1977) in the planning and post-lesson discussions are: (i) A protocol (Dudley, 2014) for Lesson Study group behaviour designed to stimulate exploratory talk, risk-taking and mutual accountability. (ii) The introduction of ‘case students’ whose intended learning is imagined in detail by the Lesson Study group and from which predictions about their in-lesson behaviours are made and whose actual responses in the research lessons are observed.These form the basis of the agenda of the post-lesson teacher discussion. (iii) A three-RL cycle allowing the group to act upon these observations and to adjust the second RL accordingly (teachers frequently find the constructs of the children as learners that they held in their heads prior to the close observation in the first RL were a long way off the mark) (Dudley, 2013). The third RL serves to test hypotheses formed during the first two RLs. (iv) Three discussion interviews with pupils following RLs designed to elicit their perspectives on what might have improved pupil learning in the lesson. One aspect of RLS that evolved similarly to that of CLS (Huang, R., Fang & Cheng, 2017) relates to the wider participation of local schools in conducting similarly themed Lesson Studies and sharing their findings together. District level meetings of the Lesson Study groups with local facilitators take place prior to and after the Lesson Studies are conducted.This is the model of RLS used in our case study in this chapter which involved groups of schools carrying out and sharing Lesson Studies in order to develop a local (London) approach to the new National Mathematics Curriculum for England (DfE, 2013). It is set out in Figure 15.1. 219

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A review of the literature that follows will explore the affordances this model offers for teachers’ collaborative, community enquiry and dialogue-centred teacher learning.

Literature review Models of LS involve one or more cycles of RLs (see Figure 15.1) which are collaboratively planned. The role of talk in the processes of both teacher and pupil learning is of critical importance. In JLS, observers of RLs will often lower themselves to desk height and take photographs of the proceedings from the perspectives of students. Lewis, Friedkin and Dotger (2018) usefully summarised pedagogical approaches to making pupil learning visible in lesson studies. Nagoya University has focused for five decades on analysing pupil learning in lesson analyses (Kuno, 2012), sometimes by transcribing pupil discussions in research lessons and using these transcripts (sometimes with teachers reading pupils’ words in role) to ‘get inside the heads’ of their students (Gardner, 1991 in Bruner, 1996, p. 6) and thus to better understand their conceptions and motivations. Here, however, we focus on the role of talk in teacher learning, in contexts of LS. But before we explore this, we will briefly consider the nature of lessons as places for working and learning and the implications of this for the professional learning of teachers. Lewis (1998) borrowed a Japanese expression about the nature of teacher knowledge and practice within lessons in her article ‘A lesson is like a swiftly flowing river’. The classroom is one of the most fast-moving, unpredictable and complex working environments that exists. It is impossible for one person to be consciously aware of all that is going on at any one time in a lesson involving 30 pupils, let alone to attempt to be so and at the same time to lead the lesson. An unconscious human response to fast-moving and complex situations is to internalise sequences of processes involved so that when a similar complex set of circumstances occurs in a later lesson, these are detected and responded to without the need for conscious recall or thought.This allows teachers to concentrate on the matter in hand (which of course demands their conscious thought and recall) without having to interrupt this conscious train of thought and decision making in order to deal with every emerging circumstance. A good example of this might occur when a teacher unconsciously responds to change in noise level or body language in class by changing her own body language or location in the classroom but does so without interrupting a critically important conversation she is having with a pupil – with whom she maintains eye contact and dialogical engagement throughout. These automated chunks of practice knowledge are in the form of tacit knowledge, and their invisibility to teachers makes changing practice hard because tacit knowledge sequences can make up the majority of a typical teacher’s overall practice knowledge (Eraut, 2000). A well-established literature has identified the benefits that can be played by ‘exploratory talk’ in the learning of students (Barnes & Todd, 1977; Mercer, 1995; Littleton & Mercer, 2013). Exploratory talk occurs when members of a group with a shared learning task begin to think ‘as one’ by taking turns to reason aloud, make suggestions, elaborate on another’s contribution, challenge or support an idea, form shared hypotheses and courses of action. They negotiate meanings and can resolve problems that none of the group could have done alone. But to do so they must first create the ability for the group to function in this way, firstly by establishing the right of each group member to participate (through a period of ‘disputational talk’:– ‘No let’s … ’, ‘No let’s … ’ ‘No let’s … ’) and then by acknowledging the affordances of the group (through a period of ‘cumulative talk’: – ‘Yeah and we could … ’ ‘Yeah and we could … ’). Disputational and cumulative talk are not generative of collaborative learning themselves, but rather they create the social dynamic conditions for the emergence of exploratory talk within the group. It is 220

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important in relation to teacher dialogue in the context of LS that Mercer and Littleton also stress the fact that discussion does not of itself facilitate exploratory talk. Ground rules for group talk need to be established in order for this to happen. Analyses of teacher talk in coaching discussions have focused on teacher talk-patterns between coaches and coachees (Lofthouse,Towler & Leat, 2010) and in JLS (Suzuki, 2012) and have revealed comparable dialogical moves to those observed in contexts of RLS (Dudley, 2013). Lofthouse and Hall developed these observations to help create a toolkit which helps novice coaches to recognise and employ habits of dialogue in order to help optimise the facility for teacher-coaching discussions to promote change in subsequent practice (Lofthouse & Hall, 2014). Dudley (2011, 2019) give an account of how the RLS model was co-designed by teachers in the light of their reflections on the experience of how the tight-knit communities of enquiry that Lesson Study groups quickly became affected by not only the nature of what they learned in their Lesson Studies but how they learned it. They consistently reported (and do so to this day) how working as a member of a collaborative group of professionals helped them to feel safe within the group and less afraid of venturing an idea or disclosing a weakness – whether or not expert practitioners are present. They also remarked on how the jointly planned lessons became jointly owned and that this meant that if something ‘went wrong’ it was not seen as one person’s weakness but because the research lesson was jointly owned it was seen as a shared learning point. This led to design evolutions in RLS that deliberately increase opportunities for learning observation-informed discussions and dialogue. Using interaction level discourse analysis to study teacher learning in RLS, Dudley (2013) found that teachers swiftly move from disputational and cumulative talk into exploratory talk (Mercer, 1995) as a result of their motivation to help their pupils learn and because they feel ‘as one’ with the LS group. This supresses their individual self-consciousness at the expense of the group’s joint consciousness, promoting ‘interthinking’ and creating an inter-mental zone of proximal development (Mercer, 2010). In RL1 discussions exploratory talk was mostly seen as teachers engaged in ‘developmental interaction sequences’ in which they reasoned, suggested and developed (including elaborating) ideas, whereas RL3 interaction sequences focused more on deep reflection and hypothesising as they looked back and evaluated their pupils’ learning and decided what to take forward into their teaching. LS group members in the study engaged in developmental interaction sequences reflecting on their learning goals, their curriculum and the RL in hand; they hypothesised about why something had not worked well in a RL just observed and what might work well for that pupil next time. They were most likely to change their views, accept new practices and let go of old ones (elements of learning) while actively, collaboratively hypothesising about pupils learning in this way or by engaging in ‘rehearsal’ to do the same thing. Rehearsal occurred when the teachers tried out together utterances or sequences of utterances from planned (or observed) lessons in role (using their ‘teacher voices’) and then imagined the responses of the pupils. In the exchange that follows from a RL planning discussion, we hear teacher A use rehearsal (italicised) to explore question forms for helping children to use a thermometer to count forwards and backwards across zero. This allows teacher B to imagine how the question will feel for pupils: ‘open’. A: Number one: ‘You have to end up with a negative number’ or ‘You have to end up with the number “minus thirteen”’. Number two: ‘You’ve got to show that the temperature goes up but you must still have an answer of minus ten’.You know, something like that. B: and that keeps it [the question] open as well, doesn’t it! A: And that’s why they need to think of the calculation that would give them that answer. 221

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‘Rehearsal’ was observed to lead teachers to elicit and utilise usually invisible tacit knowledge. This approach was developed further by Chinas (2016) who discovered similar patterns of teacher talk in RLS. Xu and Dudley (under review) used similar analyses of teacher group discussions while engaged in LS in a school district in China, finding that disputational and cumulative talk played important roles in mediating and affording exploratory talk and teacher learning in two school groups engaged in CLS in China. The RLS model has therefore developed a discussion protocol governing behaviours and attitudes of the LS group that established ground rules for talk, the need to respect (but not necessarily agree with) all contributions and to abandon normal hierarchies and come together in a ‘safe space’, equal as learners and with a shared endeavour of pooling knowledge, experience and expertise to improve pupils’ learning (Dudley, 2014). Thus, just as LS can be seen to be a fruitful deliberate process for teachers to elicit evidence of pupils learning through talk, to study or assess it and then to improve it (Dudley, 2013; Norwich, Dudley & Ylonen, 2015), it is an equally fruitful process for eliciting teacher learning through talk and for studying it (Huang et al., 2017). It can also be seen that supporting certain approaches to teacher talk in LS and avoiding others may prove helpful for teachers intending to improve their professional and curriculum development and their practice-knowledge creation through LS. This leads us to our case study of teacher talk in a mathematics-based LS context in London.

Case study of teacher talk in an LS context This example is drawn from a large-scale research and development project run by Camden Council and the University of Cambridge (2013–2015) which aimed to incorporate LS into the practice of teachers in primary, secondary and special schools (Years 5 to 8) in London, in order to help them to develop curriculum maps for the new National Mathematics Curriculum that were tailored to the needs of their pupils. Specifically, teachers formed LS groups of three to four teachers in their own schools and carried out one Lesson Study (see three-cycle model described in the Section “Lesson Study model”) per school term. This way, teachers had the opportunity to participate in three Lesson Studies per school year. Prior to the beginning of a Lesson Study, teachers attended project-wide ‘LS Focus and Planning meetings’ organised by the Camden team (led by Pete Dudley and Jean Lang). These conferences initially aimed to familiarise teachers with the Lesson Study model and subsequently to identify their focus, to study the new curriculum’s mathematical and pedagogical issues and to create a plan of action. Similarly, at the end of each Lesson Study teachers were encouraged to share their lesson studies in ‘Feedback Meetings’ bringing together their experiences. As additional help, an LS workbook, prepared by the Camden team providing space for teachers to write their notes and to collect and organise their data also contained prompts that teachers were encouraged to follow in order to facilitate their planning and reflection of research lessons. Teachers were asked to video-record all their Lesson Study meetings and send those video recordings to the Cambridge team, who prepared feedback presented at the LS Focus and Planning meeting the following term. Table 15.1 presents part of a discussion that took place in a reflection meeting of a team of male teachers from a secondary school (14-year-old students). The aim of the lesson was for students to be able to explain their thinking when they engage in mathematics problems. Teacher B was the classroom teacher of the class under study, while Teachers A and C were present during the research lesson. 222

Dialogues in contexts of Lesson Study Table 15.1  Excerpt Line

Teacher

Turns

1

B

2

C

3 4 5 6

A C A C

7

A

8 9 10 11

C A C A

12

C

13

B

14 15

C B

16

C

17 18 19

B A&C A

But let’s just concentrate on these three. “What progress did each pupil make? Was this enough?” [reading out of the workbook] […] I think Joel, of the three [case pupils], probably made the most progress in terms of verbalising his ideas. He did come up to the front at one stage and demonstrate to the class. I think, between him and, what’s the other boy’s name? Maz. No, the one who came to the board and described. Edison. Between Edison and Joel, I think they got there, in the end, where we wanted them to be. Well, they got to the extension work, which we decided we wouldn’t ask them to do. They actually took that and figured it out. I thought what was impressive was all of the extension ideas that we discussed potentially giving them came up, different sized [Inaudible] What about the different numbers? Yes. I talked to Maz and it ended up by, ‘The [inaudible word] number, what difference does that make?’ And, with a little bit of prompting, he figured that out. But I only did that to see, if we’d had more time, could we have got there? I think we probably could have done. So that’s probably a starting point for the next lesson. OK, so what we’re saying is, are we just doing progress? So he made progress in verbalising, explaining and demonstrating, which is what we’re looking for here. Yes, and I think he even got the extension. “Was that typical of others in that group of learners at the top end of the class?” [reading from workbook] Yes, because the one with algebra and, certainly, Edison had the clearest explanation. For him to have explained it that clearly, he obviously had a very clear explanation in his mind as to why this is working. Because I found that many of the students, they almost had the clarity in their minds, but they couldn’t verbalise it. Yes, and that’s where we want them to make the progress, isn’t it? Yes. That’s the key thing there, the difference for the next two.

Table 15.1 starts with a question from the workbook that encourages the teachers to consider the progress of each case pupil. In comparing the three case pupils,Teacher C evaluated that Joel made the most progress. He justified his opinion by describing Joel’s actions, referring to his demonstration in front of the class (line 2).Teacher A then added that not only Joel (and Edison) met their expectations, but they exceeded them (line 7). He justified his thinking by referring to the extension work that was not intended for these students initially; in other words, the students’ abilities were a surprise for these teachers. This prompted Teacher A to reflect on the planning of this lesson and the extension ideas that they had discussed but were eventually not included. 223

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On line 11, Teacher A shares with the group his conversation with one student, Maz. That conversation showed Teacher A that (with a bit of prompting) students were able to figure out the answer, so he concluded that if there had been more time then they could have included that too. Teacher C then adds that this should be their starting point for the next research lesson (line 12). Teacher B summarises their discussion about the case pupils (line 13). In terms of learning, teachers share information from the research lesson, either from their personal conversations with students or from their observations. This description certainly contributes to developing insights on the events of the research lesson. Apart from descriptions, teachers give their own evaluations of certain events. Here,Teacher A believes that Joel made the most progress out of the three case pupils and provides a justification for his belief. He evaluates students’ abilities when he supports that the students exceeded the teachers’ expectations. And, as a result, he evaluates their teaching plan, which could have contained more prompting, more time and more extension ideas. These evaluations reveal more interpretative thinking. In our work, these two levels of thinking were named ‘descriptive learning processes’ (DLP) and ‘interpretative learning processes’ (ILP) (Warwick,Vrikki,Vermunt, Mercer & van Halem, 2016; Vrikki, Warwick, Vermunt, Mercer & van Halem, 2017). DLP represents the co-constructed knowledge of teachers at the level of representing what is known, while ILP goes beyond description and towards evaluation, diagnosing and a consideration of ‘next steps’. Both seem to be important in developing learning through Lesson Study discussions. The mechanism for the previously described functions to emerge in this collaborative environment seems to be dialogue. As discussed in the Section “Lesson Study model”, dialogue in professional groups varies in quality (Littleton & Mercer, 2013) with some groups’ discussions being more effective than others. In order to explore the productivity of dialogue in our project, we adopted a socio-cultural theory typology approach, which ‘focuses on the use of language as a social mode of thinking’ (Mercer, 2004, p. 137). In other words, we study how each speaker in turn contributed to the joint creation of knowledge and common understanding. There seems to be increasing consensus among scholars in the field of educational dialogue that features of exploratory talk are productive (Littleton & Mercer, 2013; Howe & Abedin, 2013; Vrikki, Wheatley, Howe, Hennessy, & Mercer, 2018). In Table 15.1, we see teachers justifying their opinions; in line 2, Teacher C explained why he thought Joel made the most progress; in line 16, Teacher C justified why he thought this progress was typical of others in that group by referring to Edison. Teachers were building on each others’ ideas. In line 7, Teacher A builds on Teacher C’s ideas on Edison’s and Joel’s progress. He also builds on these ideas in line 11 where he talks about his conversation with Maz. Another characteristic of productive talk is coming to a consensus, which Teacher B does very well in this case. In line 13 he summarises what has already been said about the case pupils. Similarly, in line 17 he picks up the idea that verbalisation is where they need progress and repeats this as a summary of the discussion, with the others in agreement. We call these features ‘dialogic moves’ because they ‘move’ dialogue forward. Dialogic moves, however, need to be accompanied by supportive interactional cues in order to create a productive environment. In our work, we called these ‘supportive moves’ (Warwick et al., 2016) and we characterised them as ‘interactional cues […] which could be found either physically (e.g. nodding) or verbally (e.g. minimal responses)’ (p. 562). In Table 15.1 the teachers’ use of ‘we’ (e.g. lines 11, 12) supports the dialogue. It creates a sense of community, which makes a collaborative effort to address issues in teaching. The video data also reveal teachers nodding to the teacher who is speaking, again creating a sense of respect and acceptance of each others’ ideas. Such interactional cues do not take the thinking forward, but they are important in creating a suitable environment for dialogue to emerge. 224

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Implications for practice, research and policy In this chapter we have sought to make a case for LS as an important process for teacher learning that improves pupil learning through joint deliberate practice that cyclically interleaves review of current teaching and observed pupil learning with reflective and reflexive LS group dialogues. Dudley (2013, 2019) has also reported evidence of the sense of shared endeavor and learning community generated in LS groups. One key implication of this therefore is the need to develop more sophisticated toolkits than currently exist to help Lesson Study group members and facilitators to purposefully engender forms of talk that are conducive to the affective conditions in LS groups: where group members feel that it is their duty to study current evidence carefully before starting; where it feels ‘safe’ both to disclose gaps in professional knowledge and to take (informed) risks in order to bring about improvement. Such toolkits would need to be mediated by knowledgeable practitioners working to equip users with the know-how to orchestrate use of an array of interactional cues and dialogic moves (providing reasons, challenging, elaborating, coming to agreement) in order to enhance an LS group’s learning, promoting hypothesising and also encouraging use of ‘rehearsal’ to summon up hidden tacit knowledge. Overt ‘meta’ understanding by these experienced toolkit mediators of ‘meaning-oriented’ and ‘descriptive’ learning processes and how to orchestrate these processes through talk is also likely to increase teacher learning in LS groups that changes practice to improve pupils’ learning. It is also important to guide school and system leaders in the practicalities of making LS sustainable and indispensable by ‘plumbing it in’ to local systems and practices so it becomes part of the way a school and a local school system improve. District-level LS cycles can create the habits and routines that facilitate individual schools and teachers’ involvement and that mobilise the knowledge gained to all. In our case, for example, after the end of the project around 60 schools formed three self-run Lesson Study hubs in different areas of London that helped them continue their practice for two further years. But above all we would stress the unique contribution that systemic, collaborative forms of enquiry-driven teacher learning or ‘collective professionalism’ such as LS (Hargreaves & O’Connor, 2018) can make to dialogical, classroom-centred teacher development that is increasingly being shown to improve pupil learning and which teachers themselves both value and find fulfilling.

References Arani, M., Lander, B., Shibata,Y., KimEng Lee, C., Kuno, H., & Lau, A. (2019) The ‘chalk to talk’ to ‘guide on the side’: A cross cultural account of pedagogy that drives customised teaching for personal learning. European Journal of Education, 54(2), 86–101. Barnes, D., & Todd, F. (1977). Communication and Learning in Small Groups. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture of Education. Harvard University Press. Chinas, M. (2015). Mediation of teachers learning through talk within a professional learning community: A case study in Cyprus. Presentation at the annual conference of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction, Limassol, Cyprus, 25–29 August 2015. Department for Education (2013). The national curriculum for England to be taught in all local-authoritymaintained schools. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculum Dudley, P. (2003). Research Lesson Study: Tools and Templates. Nottingham. National College for School Leadership. Dudley, P. (2013). Teacher learning in lesson study: What interaction-level discourse analysis revealed about how teachers utilised imagination, tacit knowledge of teaching and fresh evidence of pupils learning, to develop practice knowledge and so enhance their pupils’ learning. Teaching and Teacher Education, 34, 107–121.

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Peter Dudley and Maria Vrikki Dudley, P. (2014). Lesson Study: A Handbook. www.lessonstudy.co.uk/ Dudley, P. (2015). Lesson Study: Professional Learning for Our Time. London. Routledge. Dudley, P. (2019). Teacher Education and Lesson Study. Oxford Encyclopaedia of Global Perspectives on Teacher Education. Oxford University Press. Dudley, P., Warwick, P.,Vrikki, M.,Vermunt, J., van Halem, N., & Karlsen, A. (2018). Implementing a new mathematics curriculum in England: District Research Lesson Study as a driver for student learning, teacher learning and professional dialogue. In Theory and Practices of Lesson Study in Mathematics, an International Perspective. New York: Springer. Dudley, P., Xu, H., Vermunt, J. D. & Lang, J. (2019). Empirical evidence of the impact of lesson study on: students’ achievement, teachers’ professional learning and on institutional and system evolution: an illustrative, complex case-development exemplar in London. European Journal of education, 54. 2. 202–217 Eraut, M. (2000). Non-formal learning and tacit knowledge in professional work. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 70(1), 113–136. Hargreaves, A., & O’Connor, M. (2018). Collaborative Professionalism: When Teaching Together Means Learning for All. New York: Corwin. Howe, C., & Abedin, M. (2013). Classroom dialogue: A systematic review across four decades of research. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43(3), 325–356. Huang, R., Fang,Y., & Cheng, X. (2017). Chinese lesson study: A deliberate practice, a research methodology and an improvement science. International Journal of Lesson and Learning Studies, 6(4), 270–282. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Littleton, K., & Mercer, N. (2013). Interthinking: Putting Talk to Work. Routledge. Lewis, C. (1998). A lesson is like a swiftly flowing river: How research lessons improve Japanese education. American Educator, (Winter), 12–17 & 50–51. Lewis, C., Friedkin, S., & Dotger, S. (2018). Making student learning visible in research lessons, WALS Webinar series. World Association of Lesson Study. http://www.walsnet.org/blog/2018/05/29/ making-student-thinking-visible/ Lofthouse, R., & Hall, E. (2014). Developing practices in teachers’ professional dialogue in England: Using Coaching Dimensions as an epistemic tool. Professional Development in Education, 40(5), 758–778. Lofthouse, R., Towler, C., & Leat, D. (2010). Improving Coaching: Evolution Not Revolution. Reading: CfBT Education Trust. Mercer, N. (1995). The Guided Construction of Knowledge: Talk Amongst Teachers and Learners. Clevedon. Multilingual Matters. Mercer, N. (2004). Sociocultural discourse analysis: Analysing classroom talk as a social mode of thinking. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 37–68. Norwich, B., Dudley, P., & Ylonen, A. (2014). Using lesson studies to assess students’ learning. International Journal of Lesson and Learning Studies, 3(3), 192–207. Rudduck, J., Chaplain, R., & Wallace, G. (Eds). (1996). School Improvement:What can Pupils Tell Us? London: David Fulton. Suzuki, Y. (2012). Teachers’ professional discourse in a Japanese lesson study. International Journal of Lesson and Learning Studies, 1(2), 216–231. Takahashi, A., & McDougal,T. (2015) Collaborative lesson research: Maximizing the impact of lesson study. ZBM Mathematics Education, 48, 513–526. Vermunt, J.,Vrikki, M., van Halem, N.,Warwick, P., & Mercer, N. (2019).The impact of lesson study professional development on the quality of teacher learning. Teaching and Teacher Education, 81, 61–73. Vrikki, M., Warwick, P., Vermunt, J.D., Mercer, N., & Van Halem, N. (2017). Teacher learning in the context of lesson study: A video-based analysis of teacher discussions. Teaching and Teacher Education, 61C, 211–224. Vrikki, M.,Wheatley, L., Howe, C., Hennessy, S., & Mercer, N. (2018). Dialogic practices in primary school classrooms. Language & Education. doi:10.1080/09500782.2018.1509988 Warwick, P., Vrikki, M., Vermunt, J. D., Mercer, N., & Van Halem, N. (2016). Connecting observations of student and teacher learning: An examination of dialogic processes in lesson study discussions in mathematics. ZDM Mathematics Education, 48(4), 555–569. Xu, H., & Dudley, P. (under review) Illuminating the Black Box of Collaboration: Interaction Function Analysis as a Methodological Approach for Understanding Collaboration and Learning in Lesson Study Contexts.

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16 HOW DIALOGIC TEACHERS CREATE THE DIALOGIC CLASSROOM Lessons from Japanese teachers Kiyotaka Miyazaki

Kihaku Saitou and his pedagogy This chapter introduces dialogic views on the classroom lesson developed by some Japanese teachers and particularly focuses on the Saitou pedagogy developed by Kihaku Saitou and the practitioners that have been influenced by this pedagogy.While Saitou pedagogy is not based on any academic theory nor specifically refers to dialogic pedagogy, it is dialogic nonetheless, and the remarkable feature that makes it dialogic is its insights about what the teacher does to make the lesson dialogic. In this chapter, the Saitou pedagogical view on the teacher’s dialogic lesson preparation and development is introduced by referring to the dialogic theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and through a comparison with other dialogic pedagogical theories. Kihaku Saitou (1911–1981) became an elementary school teacher in 1930 and was the principal of a number of elementary schools in the 1960s, which consequently became famous for their high-quality education under Saitou’s leadership. Saitou organised the Kyoujugaku Kenkyu no Kai, or the Pedagogical Research Group, in 1973, which many practitioners joined. He also visited many schools as an adviser and wrote a great deal about his approach, which together make up around 30 volumes, which has had a significant influence on several generations of Japanese practitioners. Subsequently, this approach became known as Saitou pedagogy (Kasahara, 1991). Even though Saitou passed many years ago, practitioners are still learning and developing his views. Saitou pedagogy believes that the teaching and learning process is an interaction between the students, the learning materials, and the teacher, particularly focuses on the efforts the teacher needs to make to ensure there is a dialogic triadic relationship, and argues that the teacher’s authentic learning of the student learning material and the discovery of authentic questions is the most important aspect of the dialogic lesson. Saitou pedagogy sees the teacher’s engagement with the learning material not as familiarisation but as authentic learning. Therefore, even in learning materials for younger children, teachers can and should seek to discover new questions. This chapter will focus on the issue of the teacher’s learning in Saitou pedagogy and discuss its implication through a comparison with previous dialogue and dialogic pedagogical theories. 227

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In the next section, previous theories of dialogue and the dialogic pedagogy which relate to the teacher’s work will be reviewed. Then, the central ideas of Saitou pedagogy will be introduced by examining Saitou’s writings. After that, some specific forms of teacher’s learning in preparation and the lesson will be shown by analysing lesson examples, and their implication will be discussed.

Previous theories relating to the teacher role in dialogic lessons Bakhtin Studies on dialogism, and on Bakhtin in particular, are useful when examining the teacher’s roles in the dialogic lesson. First, many studies have highlighted the triadic relationship and dialogic structure between the dialogue participants and the topic. Linell (2009) claimed that the triadic relationship has been a key concept in dialogic research traditions such as in Bakhtin (1984), Markova (2003), Ongstad (2004), and Zittoun, Gillespie, Cornish, & Psaltis (2007). Bakhtin, for example, mentioned the triadic relationship in several books and described, in one of them, the relationship as a ‘drama in which three characters participate’ (Bakhtin, 1986, pp. 121–122), that is the author (the speaker), the listener, and past speakers, with the triadic relationship being between the speaker, the word, and the others. Bakhtin argued that the author and the others had an equal right to the word (Bakhtin, ibid.) and described this relationship as ‘the equal rights of consciousnesses vis-à-vis truth’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 285), which is a necessary condition for a triadic relationship to become dialogic (Matusov, 2009). Bakhtin’s view on the polyphonic author also suggests a dialogic pedagogy (Bakhtin, 1984; Lensmire, 1997; Miyazaki, 2017, August). Bakhtin (1984) distinguished two types of authors: monologic and polyphonic.While a polyphonic author such as Dostoevsky creates the world in the novel in the same way as a monologic author, unlike the monologic author, the polyphonic author ‘does not transform others’ consciousnesses (that is, the consciousnesses of the characters) into objects, and does not give them secondhand and finalising definitions’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 68). Therefore, the polyphonic author creates the characters and at the same time has equal rights with the characters, that is, as suggested by Morson and Emerson (1990), the polyphonic author plays two roles. Bakhtin (1984) developed these two roles further. Bakhtin exemplified Dostoevsky as a polyphonic author who used various devices to stimulate the dialogue. For example, Dostoevsky used ‘the adventure plot’ which was ‘combined with the posing of profound and acute problems … It places a person in extraordinary positions that expose and provoke him’ (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 105). Further, as a participant in the dialogue, the polyphonic author participates in the dialogue to hear the voices of heroes. Bakhtin observed that Dostoevsky had ‘an extraordinary gift for hearing’ the individual voices and their dialogic interactions (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 90).

Dialogic pedagogy In the dialogic pedagogy, many studies presuppose a triadic relationship between the students, the teacher, and the shared topic but have not used the term ‘triadic relationship’ (Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Rogoff, 1994; Wells, 1999; Freire, 2004; Matusov, 2009). Freire, for example, argued as follows: ‘[A]ny educational practice always implies the existence of (1) a subject or agent (a person who instructs and teaches); (2) the person who learns, but by learning who teaches; and (3) the object to be imparted and taught’ (Freire, 2004, p. 153). These studies all saw the teacher as a co-learner with the students; however, they differed in what they perceived the teachers learned. Rogoff, Turkanis, and Barlett (2001), for 228

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example, argued that the teacher learns how to chart the direction of the curriculum from the students; that is, the teacher learns about the students’ strategies and thoughts, which then allows them to develop ways to specifically aid the students. In other words, they supposed that the teacher learns what the students think about the learning material, rather than from the learning material itself. In contrast, however, Matusov (2009) argued that the teacher learns something new about the learning material as part of the teacher/student exchange, claiming that the teacher’s knowledge ‘collapses’ (Matusov, 2009, p. 88) when they encounter ‘a not knowledgeable student’. In other words, encountering ‘a not knowledgeable student’ and the demonstration of their misunderstanding of the learning material allows the teacher to dispense with their old understanding of the learning material and learn something new about it. Matusov characterised this type of teacher as an epistemological learner and argued that these teachers are dialogic as they have an equal right vis-à-vis the truthfulness of the student learning material. In reference to the polyphonic author, a teacher in a dialogic lesson has two roles as the creator of the lesson and a participant in the lesson. All the studies previously cited recognised these two roles and characterised the teacher not only as a co-learner but also as an organiser; for example, Mercer and Littleton (2007) characterised the teacher as a facilitator, and some others explicitly identified these two roles, such as Wells (1999), who saw the teacher as both an organiser and a co-inquirer, and Lensmire (1997), who referred to the two roles of Bakhtin’s (1984) polyphonic author to characterise the teacher. The discussions have focused on the activities associated with an organiser role and the devices the teachers use. As an organiser of the dialogic lesson, the devices used are similar to the polyphonic author’s device of ‘setting the adventure plot’, as in the thought-provoking question discussed in Wells (1999), though he did not explain the details, and Matusov’s ‘dialogic provocations that ontologically engage them in some inquiry through provoking responses that students are asked to justify and test against alternative responses’ (Matusov, 2011, p. 37). These devices are similar to Bakhtin’s ‘setting the adventure plot’ in the sense that they provoke students with thought-provoking questions or by making them engage ‘through provoking responses’.

The central ideas in Saitou pedagogy This section introduces Saitou pedagogy’s views by examining what Saitou thought from Saitou’s writings. Saitou saw the triadic relation between the students, the learning material, and the teacher as being related to the lesson structure. In thinking about the classroom lesson, he examined not only the student-to-student relationship nor the relationship between the student and learning material but also the teacher-to-student relationship and the relationship between the teacher and the learning material. He did not view the teacher as an outside regulator of the student-to-student or student-to-learning-material relationships. He wrote as follows: The teacher and the children, the teacher and the teaching materials, the child and the child, the children and the teaching material. All these pairs should correspond, and resonate. A climax should come, explode and something new should be born as a consequence. The teacher’s thought and the children’s thought, the child’s thought and the child’s thought. These pairs should resonate so that new views emerge, and the new views return to the teacher and each child, making them bigger and richer.1 (Saitou, 1970, pp. 68–69) 229

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The term teaching material is the technical term popularly used in Japanese education for the learning materials. Saitou saw the meaning of the term ‘to correspond’ as ‘confronting’ (Saitou, 1970, p. 368) and the term ‘to resonate’ as ‘to influence each other’. In the triadic relationship, both the students and the teacher inquire about the learning material, with the student and teacher understanding of the learning material creating a confrontation where sometimes there are agreements and sometimes there are conflicts; however, through this confrontation, both the students and the teacher deepen their understanding. Therefore, Saitou’s triadic relationship involves students seeking to inquire about and understand the learning material, the teacher inquiring about and understanding the learning material, and the relationship between these two levels of understanding (see Figure 16.1). As noted previously, many dialogic pedagogical researchers have characterised the teacher as learning as the students do, or as a co-learner; what did Saitou think of this issue? First of all, a teacher should wholeheartedly encounter and confront the teaching material in all its respects as one person. Understanding the material conceptually to make them explainable to others is not enough. The teacher should interact wholeheartedly with the teaching material, analyse it, have questions about it, ask himself/herself, discover something, and create something—as one person. Through these endeavours, the teacher should accumulate new thinking, new logic, and new development. (Saitou, 1964, pp. 89–90) In this quote, the teacher’s learning is described as a whole-hearted engagement with the learning material. For Saitou, the teacher’s learning becomes authentic when the teacher engages whole-heartedly with the learning material to discover new questions and deepen their understanding, that is, it is not learning to know how to make the learning material easy for the students to understand nor is it learning to know how the students may misunderstand the material. For Saitou, the teacher is a co-learner of students in the sense that she/he can learn authentically the students’ learning materials as students learn them. The teacher commits to learning the learning material first in the preparation phase before the lesson. However, she/he continues learning during the lesson phase. She/he learns about the

student’s confrontation with the learning material

student

learning material

student’s new understanding/ new quesons

teacher’s confrontation with the learning material

teacher’s new understanding/ new quesons

present/examine their understandings and questions

Figure 16.1 Triadic relationship in Saitou pedagogy.

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learning material as a result of the their ‘correspondence and resonance’ with the students, that is, the teacher learns about the learning material from the students. In the classroom lesson, both the teacher and the child present and examine each other about the learning material as to which they have committed themselves. In such activities, both the child and the teacher transform the misunderstandings or narrow understanding of the learning material they had before, and transform themselves into beings different from the past. (Saitou, 1975/1995, p. 7) In interacting with students in the lesson, teacher may learn from students about students themselves: their typical ways of misunderstanding of the material, their developmental stage, and so on. Saitou emphasised not these aspects but the other, however: learning from students about the learning material itself to ‘transform the misunderstanding and/or narrow understanding’ about it. How are these Saitou’s ideas materialised in the lesson? In the next two sections, a form of teacher’s learning in the preparation phase and another form in the lesson phase will be introduced and discussed through comparing it to the previous theories of dialogue and the dialogic pedagogy.

The discovery of new questions when learning the learning material The teacher’s unknown questions One product of the teacher’s authentic learning is the discovery/identification of new questions. The teacher may have believed that they understood the material very well, but actually there may be further authentic questions in the material, the answers to which the teacher has not recognised before or even whose existence the teacher has not known before. Miyazaki (2005, 2013; Matusov & Miyazaki, 2014) named this the unknown question, and contrasted this concept with the known-information question (Mehan, 1979), the answer to which is already known by the teacher. Unknown questions are sometimes discovered in the topics that the teacher thought they understood well and felt familiar with. The teacher can discover unknown questions in the learning material during lesson preparation, which stimulates them to further inquiry and stimulates the students to collaboratively inquire about the questions with the teacher. In other words, the teacher as the organiser of the dialogic lesson can use these unknown questions as a device to make the lesson dialogic.

A lesson example from a social studies class In the following, a typical example of an unknown question was prepared by the teacher before the lesson.The lesson was developed by Katsuhiko Sakuma, a social studies education researcher who has practised Saitou pedagogy for many years (Sakuma, 1992).The question ‘what is a shop’ appears to be a very easy question with an obvious answer for elementary school students or at least for those in the higher classes; therefore, it would seem unlikely to evoke student interest. In these classes, however, the students tackled the question enthusiastically.The lesson example was taken from a fifth grade class of 31 students, which was observed by the author (Miyazaki, 2009). Sakuma began the lesson with questions about five photos – a grocer, a barbershop, a launderette, a vending machine, and a peddler – by asking ‘is each one a shop?’. At the start of the 231

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lesson, the students were asked whether they thought each one was a shop. Thirty said that the grocery was a shop, sixteen said the barbershop was shop, five said the launderette was a shop, one said the vending machine was a shop, and no students said the peddler was a shop. Then, the students discussed this order with each other. Here the discussion on the vending machine is given. Teacher: Next. the vending machine.Who thinks that the vending machine is a shop? Five of you. The number of students who said yes increased from the first probe, probably because of the influence of the discussion so far. Student: It is a shop because you can buy goods by putting coins in it. They have already learned that barbershop was a shop because they had to pay money to buy a service there when they discussed about the barbershop. Student: Because there is an owner of the vending machine. This topic of the ownership appeared in the discussion on the launderette. Teacher: Who thinks it is a shop? The number of students who said yes increased to ten, with those saying no reducing to only a few. Teacher: Student: Teacher: Student:

Why isn’t it a shop? It doesn’t work when it fails, or after the company’s closing time. We cannot use shops sometimes even when there is a shop clerk. Yeah. Machines are more robust.

Student: (In the case of ) sell out (you cannot use the vending machine). Teacher: You can experience something being sold even in a grocery. More so than in the vending machine. The teacher moved to the next question on the peddler without concluding the discussion. After discussing the five questions, the teacher told the students a short history of the shop, even though he had not given the students the answers to the questions except for the grocery and the barber. Finally, he asked the students to ask people around them if the remaining three were shops or not. This lesson example was shown here as the unknown question in the lesson as to what is a shop. How did Sakuma discover the question? Sakuma told the author in the interview that it started with the vending machine (Miyazaki, 2009) as it raised the question in his mind whether a vending machine could be defined as a shop. He conducted some pre-lesson field work by interviewing a range of people, from an employee of a vending machine dealer to a government official from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and found that many people had different answers and there was no definitive academic or legal answer, not only to the question about the vending machine, but also to the question about shops in general.Through this learning, Sakuma made the apparently easy question of whether a vending machine is a shop or not a difficult question for which he had no definitive answer and which he could explore with the students. A launderette and a peddler were chosen for the lesson as non-typical cases similar to the vending machine. A grocer was chosen as a typical shop and the barber was added as an in-between case. The need to make comparisons stimulated the students to inquire about the nature of a shop. In the learning process, Sakuma’s old understanding about a shop collapsed. Before the learning, he had not thought that identifying shops was a serious question. He believed that there had to be 232

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a definition of the shop even if he did not know it. After his fieldwork, he learned that there was no clear definition for a shop.Therefore, his learning was comparable to the learning of Matusov’s (2009) epistemological learner, that is, his old understanding collapsed, and new, authentic questions were discovered for which he did not have an answer, which then stimulated the students to engage in arguing about the true nature of a shop. These questions worked as devices to provoke student discussion, as Wells’ (1999) thought-provoking question and Matusov’s (2011) dialogic provocation.The uniqueness of Saitou pedagogy lies in its emphasis on the teacher’s own authentic learning of the learning material to prepare for the dialogic provocation.

Listening for student questions in their responses Unknown questions in the students’ thoughts Unknown questions can be discovered not only by the teacher’s learning of the learning material in the preparation phase but also when the teacher becomes a participant in the dialogue with the students, at which time the teacher can listen for new questions in the student dialogue that the students may not even be aware of. In particular, the teacher can sometimes identify new questions in seemingly wrong responses to a preceding question. When someone answers a question posed by another during a conversation, they often do not answer the question in accordance with the questioner’s intent; rather, they interpret the question in their own way. Although the questioner and the responder are apparently sharing the question, the responder generates new questions that are different from the original and answers them accordingly. Using Gadamer’s (1960/1975) term, the questioner and the responder encounter the same situation but have different horizons, with apparently the same but different questions. This can also happen during a lesson and could be seen as an important teaching moment. In such cases, the student apparently answers the teacher’s (or another student’s) question but actually answers, without awareness in most cases, a question that they understood in their own way and is different from the intent of the teacher’s (or another’s) question. Therefore, the student’s answer may be evaluated by the teacher as irrelevant or even wrong. However, if the teacher can discover the deeper student question in the student’s ‘irrelevant’ or ‘wrong’ answer and present it to the unaware student, this provides the student and the class with an opportunity to begin a new inquiry into the learning material (Miyazaki, 2017, September). Using a student’s possibly inaccurate answer to facilitate lesson development has long been recognised in the Japanese pedagogical framework as it provides the teacher with an opportunity to delve into the essence of the learning material (Toyoda, 2007). However, it was Tsukamoto (2014), a practitioner of Saitou, who argued that a student’s wrong answer had the potential to facilitate lesson development, because a new, often undetected, question is hidden behind the wrong answer. He wrote: [A] child’s chosen question is different from the teacher’s intended one. In that case, the child’s answer does not correspond to the intended answer of the teacher, and the teacher deems it wrong. However, if the child’s answer can be traced back to the child’s question that delivered the answer, the teacher may become aware of a new view of the learning topic hidden in the child’s ‘wrong answer’. (Tsukamoto, 2014, p. 25) For the teacher, this is a further opportunity to discover an unknown question, as they did not know of its existence before hearing the student’s answer. As noted before, Saitou argued that the teacher can learn about the learning material from students in the lesson. Discovery of 233

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new questions in students is a form of this learning, through which the teacher widens her/his old, narrow understanding about the learning material. Needless to say, the teacher’s ‘discovery’ of the student’s question is more precisely the inference they have derived from the student’s answer, as there is no guarantee that this was the interpretation in the student’s mind. However, the teacher can request feedback from the student to clarify their inference, and the student and the teacher can exchange and develop their views together.

A lesson example from a science class Let us examine a lesson example. The class teacher in this example was Ken’ichirou Seki from the Nagano elementary school attached to the School of Education, Shinshu University at the time of the lesson (Miyazaki, 2013; 2017, September). Note that Seki is not a follower of Saitou nor does know of Tsukamoto (2014) but had grasped a similar idea intuitively through experience. Regardless, this example is used here as it clearly shows the applicability of Tsukamoto’s ideas even in a science lesson in which there is supposed to be only one correct answer to any question.The class record was taken by the teacher himself (Nagano elementary school attached to the Faculty of Education, Shinshu University, 2010). This chemistry lesson was for fifth graders, and the topic was a part of a unit on the dissolution of matter. At the beginning of the class, students saw a movie in which a bottle of aqueous ammonium chloride was being immersed into cool water after which white crystals emerged one after the other into the transparent solution. The students thought that the ammonium chloride once dissolved had recrystallised and then examined how they could reproduce the experiment in groups. After the experiment, one group reported that when they put the bottle in cool water, the quantity of undissolved crystals of ammonium chloride at the bottom of the bottle appeared larger. They concluded that this demonstrated the recrystallisation of the dissolved ammonium chloride. Nao:

We put ammonium chloride and hot water in a small bottle, put the bottle in a beaker and heated it. But nothing happened. So, we dipped the bottle in a cold water.Then, the quantity of the crystal from the ammonium chloride looked larger.. Teacher: Really? Shin: Absolutely. One student, Hide, argued against this idea Hide:

It means that the undissolved crystals at the bottom of the bottle had just become larger, doesn’t it? Teacher: You mean that the undissolved crystal, it had expanded, don’t you? Hide: Yeah. Because, although a small amount of ammonium chloride would have dissolved, the transparent liquid in the bottle is mostly water. Although Hide’s view that the undissolved crystal at the bottom of the bottle had just expanded was incorrect, the teacher felt his view must have been based on his prior experience and may have some development possibilities, so he hesitated to label this view simply as an error. He asked for the other students’ thoughts; however, most students disagreed with Hide, saying that the crystal at the bottom of the bottle became larger due to the recrystallisation. Taka:

There must be ammonium chloride in the upper, transparent part of the bottle. I did the experiment successfully. At first, I saw nothing in the bottle, as the inside of the bottle was transparent. Then the crystal emerged. So, the increase in the quantity of the crystal in Nao’s case must have been emerged from the transparent liquid. 234

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Hide argued against this idea again. Hide: Hiro:

In the case of the saline solution (students had done the Saline experiment before), the upper layer was not so salty. Though it was not salty before stirring, it became salty everywhere after we stirred it. Well, I get confused.

After that, the teacher showed students a schematic picture of water molecules and asked the students to discuss where the molecules of ammonium chloride go when they dissolve. Finally, the students determined an idea for the new experiment. Mami: Taka:

Oh, I got it.We can evaporate the liquid in the upper, transparent layer of the bottle. Then, I think that there is ammonium chloride in the upper, transparent layer, and it gives us an evidence.

The experiment was conducted, and the problem was settled. In this lesson, the first question the class had after the experiment was why crystal of the ammonium chloride had become bigger. Though Hide’s answer to this question was incorrect, the reasons he cited, that is, the upper layer was mostly water so there would not be much ammonium chloride to crystalise, were not so unreasonable. His reasoning showed that he had a question if there was much ammonium chloride in the upper layer, to which he answered ‘no’. In other words, the teacher and the other students had presupposed in their first question that there was a large quantity of ammonium chloride in the upper layer. Using Gadamer’s term, Hide and the others had different ‘horizons’. When the teacher responded to Hide, the teacher was not explicitly aware of this difference and had just felt that there was something important in Hide’s thinking, so he did not tell him it was wrong, which then made it possible to have a discussion with Hide and the other students about the upper layer, which resulted in the teacher showing schematic pictures of the water molecules. Through this process, the question about the quantity of ammonium chloride in the upper layer was focused on and shared in the class, which led to another new question regarding how to confirm the existence of the ammonium chloride in the upper layer. This example exemplifies the benefits a teacher can gain from listening to the student in the dialogue. If teachers listen new questions with different ‘horizons’ from the student’s in the student’s ‘wrong’ answers, unknown questions can arise, the existence of which the teacher was not aware of before the students answered. As noted, Bakhtin pointed out the importance of listening for Dostoevsky as a polyphonic author. Listening to the students’ voices is also an important element in Saitou pedagogy; however, its uniqueness lies in inferring the new students’ questions from their utterances. As noted in the previous section, the teacher presents their own unknown questions discovered in the preparation phase to the students; however, the teacher also learns additional unknown questions from the students. When a teacher is involved in listening to new questions in the students’ answers, the teacher becomes involved in the dialogue and has an equal right vis-à-vis the truthfulness of the learning material with the students, which is the essence of Saitou pedagogy.

Conclusion This chapter introduced the dialogic pedagogy developed by Japanese practitioners called Saitou pedagogy and compared it with Bakhtin’s view and theories of dialogic pedagogy. Saitou pedagogy is characterised by a lesson structure that involves a triadic relationship between the stu235

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dents, the learning material, and the teacher and focuses on the teacher’s authentic learning of students’ learning material and the discovery of new questions to which she/he does not have the answer or whose existences she/he has not known before learning. The teacher, as the organiser of the dialogic lesson, can identify unknown questions in the learning material in the preparation phase of the lesson, which can then be used to stimulate student inquiry. The teacher’s second role is as a participant in the dialogue where they can discover further new questions by listening to the students’ responses in the lesson. Therefore, the teacher not only presents new questions to the students but also learns new questions from the students, that is, the teacher is dialogic as they have an equal right with the students vis-à-vis the truthfulness of the learning material. In previous theories of dialogue and the dialogic pedagogy, the triadic relationship between the participants and the dialogue topic has been presupposed to be the basic dialogue structure. However, neither the relationship between the teacher and the learning material, the teacher’s learning of the learning material, or the teacher’s discovery of new questions in the learning material have been paid much attention, which are the most important characteristics in Saitou pedagogy. Bakhtin believed that the polyphonic author had two roles as the creator of the dialogue and as a participant in the dialogue (Morson & Emerson, 1990). Some dialogic pedagogical theorists have also recognised that the teacher also has two roles as the organiser of the dialogic lesson and as the participant of the dialogue. Bakhtin (1984) identified Dostoevsky as an example of a polyphonic author who used the adventure plot as a device to create dialogue; similarly, Saitou pedagogy’s unknown questions can be used as a device of the lesson organiser to make a lesson dialogic, which is similar to Matusov’s (2011) dialogic provocation. Bakhtin (1984) also pointed out that Dostoevsky had ‘an extraordinary gift for hearing’; similarly, Saitou pedagogy argues that the teacher is able to discover new questions by listening to the students when in dialogue with them as a participant of the lesson, which can then be used to stimulate lesson development. The teacher’s discovery of new questions within the learning material is the unique characteristic of Saitou pedagogy and not focused by previous theories of the dialogue and the dialogic pedagogy. However, as yet the theoretical implications of this question discovery in the lesson development and its relationship with student learning has not been fully investigated. Therefore, there are further unexplored areas associated with Saitou pedagogy and dialogic pedagogy.

Note 1 The current author translated all the Japanese texts used in this chapter into English.

References Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. C. Emerson. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. V. W. McGee. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Freire, P. (2004). Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. R. R. Barr. London: Continuum International Publishing. Gadamer, H. G. (1960/1975). Truth and Method.Trans. J.Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall. London: Continuum. Kasahara, H. (1991). Hyouden Saitou Kihaku: Sono shigoto to ikikata (Critical Biography of Kihaku Saitou: His Works and Life). Tokyo: Ikkei-shobou. Lensmire,T. J. (1997).The teacher as Dostoevskian novelist. Research in the Teaching of English, 31(3), 367–392. Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically: Interactional and Contextual Theories of Human Sense-Making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing INC.

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How teachers create the dialogic classroom Markova, I. (2003). Dialogicality and Social Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matusov, E. (2009). Journey into Dialogic Pedagogy. New York: Nova Science Publishers. Matusov, E. (2011). Authorial teaching and learning. In E. J. White & M. A. Peters (Eds.), Bakhtinian Pedagogy: Opportunities and Challenges for Research, Policy and Practice in Education Across the Globe (pp. 21–46). New York: Peter Lang. Matusov, E., & Miyazaki, K. (2014). Dialogue on dialogic pedagogy. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 2, 1–44. Mehan, H. (1979). “What time is it, Denise?”: Asking known information questions in classroom discourse. Theory into Practice, 28(4), 285–294. Mercer, N., & Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking: A Sociocultural Approach. Abingdon: Routledge. Miyazaki, K. (Ed.). (2005). Sogo-gakushu wa shikou-ryoku wo sodateru (Comprehensive Learning Fosters Children’s Thought). Tokyo: Ikkei-shobou. Miyazaki, K. (2009). Kodomo no manabi kyoushi no manabi (Children’s Learning, Teacher’s Learning). Tokyo: Ikkei-Shbou. Miyazaki, K. (2013). From “unknown questions” begins a wonderful education: Kyozai-Kaishaku and the dialogic classroom. In K. Egan, A. Cant & G. Judson (Eds.), Wonder-Full Education: The Centrality of Wonder in Teaching and Learning Across the Curriculum (pp. 110–121). New York: Routledge. Miyazaki, K. (2017, August). Triadic relations between students, teacher, and the learning contents as the basis of the dialogic pedagogy. Paper presented at 5th International Conference of International Society of Cultural and Activity Research. Quebec City, Canada. Miyazaki, K. (2017, September). Questioning as the key for the dialogue to develop: Bakhtin encountering with Gadamer. Paper presented at the 16th International Bakhtin Conference, Shanghai, China. Morson, C. S., & Emerson, C. (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nagano elementary school attached to the Faculty of Education, Shinshu University (Ed.). (2010). Kokoro to karada wo hiraite tomoni manabu kodomo kyoushi (Children and the Teachers Who Learn Collaboratively with Their Bodies and Minds Being Open) (Report No. 54). Nagano elementary school attached to the Faculty of Education, Shinshu University. Ongstad, S. (2004). Bakhtin’s triadic epistemology and ideologies of dialogism. In F. Bostad, C. Brandist, L. S. Evensen & H. C. Faber (Eds.), Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language and Culture (pp. 65–88). London: Palgrave. Rogoff, B. (1994). Developing understanding of the idea of communities of learners. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 1(4), 209–229. Rogoff, B., Turkanis, C. G., & Bartlet, L. (Eds.). (2001). Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Saitou, K. (1964). Jugyo no tenkai (Development of Classroom Lesson). Tokyo: Kokudo-sha. Saitou, K. (1970). Kyouiku-gaku no susume (Recommending Pedagogy). Tokyo: Chikuma-shobou. Saitou, K. (1975/1995). Jugyo to kyouzai-kaishaku (Classroom Lesson and Interpreting the Teaching Material). Tokyo: Ikkei-shobou. Sakuma, K. (1992). Shakai-ka nazotoki yusaburi itsutsu no jugyo (Five Classroom Lessons of Questioning and Shaking in Social Studies). Tokyo: Gakuji-shuppan. Toyoda, H. (2007). Shudan shiko no jugyou zukuri to hatsumon ryoku: Riron hen (Jugyo-ryoku appu heno chosen vol. 12) (Making Lessons of Group Thinking and the Skill of Questioning: A Theory (The Challenge for Raising the Lesson Skills)). Tokyo: Meiji tosho. Tsukamoto,Y. (2014). Kodomo wa kyoushi no “hatsumon” towa kotonaru “toi” wo motsu (Children have different “questions” from “teacher posed question.”). Chiba-Keisai-Daigaku-Tanki-Daigaku-bu Kiyo (The Proceedings of Chiba Keizai College), 10, 25–37. Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic Inquiry:Toward a Sociocultural Practice and Theory of Education. New York: Cambridge University Press. Zittoun,T., Gillespie, A., Cornish, F., & Psaltis, C. (2007).The metaphor of the triangle in theories of human development. Human Development, 50, 208–229.

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17 TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT TO SUPPORT CLASSROOM DIALOGUE Challenges and promises Sara Hennessy and Maree Davies

Introduction We first outline some key teacher professional development (TPD) programmes that have attempted to address the issue of teacher domination of classroom talk, observed particularly in the UK and USA (Cazden, 2001; Galton, Hargreaves, Comber, Wall, & Pell, 1999; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Nystrand, Gamoran, Kachur, & Prendergast, 1997; Smith, Hardman, Wall, & Mroz, 2004) but also in other countries (Alexander, 2001). In most classrooms, teachers almost invariably guide and control the discourse, holding interpretive authority (Murphy, Wilkinson, & Soter, 2011) while students participate passively and with limited epistemic agency. We identify which features of dialogue appear to be more (and less) often adopted by teachers and students and then consider the key factors contributing to why dialogue is not commonly observed in primary/elementary or secondary schools. For the purposes of this chapter, we define dialogue as interaction where participants: position themselves in relation to others, recognising diverse voices, beliefs, and perspectives (Bakhtin, 1981); pose open questions, critique and build on others’ ideas, reason and think together (e.g., Mercer & Littleton, 2007). We raise some issues related to demands on teachers and the methodology of initiatives that might contribute to the patchy nature of the successes observed.The account is illustrated with examples of recent research in Chile, England, and New Zealand. It concludes with some recommendations for designing and supporting successful, sustainable schoolbased TPD across diverse contexts.

History of teacher professional development related to dialogue: 1970s to date TPD initiatives in primary/elementary schools A succession of researchers and educators have attempted to address the teacher domination of classroom talk through the logical route of designing and implementing TPD focused on developing dialogic pedagogy, usually through workshops. Such programmes are often evaluated via a pre- to 238

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post-intervention design. Two key historical programmes are now outlined and their effectiveness considered. From the mid-1970s through to the 1980s, Gordon Wells conducted a large research study in Bristol with young children, endorsing the power of talk (Wells, 1989).Wells suggested that, for the development of language, learners must be taken seriously as conversational partners, especially by adults. Subsequent work in Toronto showed that an inquiry orientation to curriculum made dialogue more likely to occur. The most important action that a teacher could take to shift the interaction from monologic to dialogic was to ask open-ended questions and then encourage students to respond to, and build upon, others’ contributions (Wells, 1999, 2009; Wells & Arauz, 2006). Research in England and elsewhere showed, however, that Wells’ recommendations were largely unfulfilled. Some teachers undertook these activities with the whole class, but they were rarely evident in groups (Galton, Simon, & Croll, 1980; Nystrand et al., 1997). To address the gap, Mercer, Dawes,Wegerif, and Sams at the Open University (2004) conducted the ground-breaking “Thinking Together” programme in the 1990s. The programme supports teachers in promoting and modelling Exploratory Talk (Barnes, 1976) in which participants pool ideas, opinions, and information, reason and think aloud together, creating new knowledge and understanding. Generating Exploratory Talk depends on the willingness of all participants to respect some basic “ground rules” for talk (Edwards & Mercer, 1987) originally created and agreed by both teacher and class. The children learn to expect any claims to be questioned or challenged with counterclaims and to seek reasons in response. Learners consider alternatives carefully before taking a shared decision. The work was developed particularly in the context of groups working on computers (see historical overview by Mercer, Hennessy, & Warwick, 2017). Conditions for success included some meta-awareness of how talk can be used for collaboratively solving problems (Wegerif, Mercer, & Dawes, 1999). Several evaluations of the approach in the UK and Mexico (Mercer & Littleton, 2007) showed that Exploratory Talk stimulated development of reasoning skills (Wegerif et al., 1999), attainment in science (Mercer et al., 2004), mathematics (Mercer & Sams, 2006), oracy, and literacy (Rojas-Drummond et al., 2010). What mechanisms underlie this learning? The various experimental studies by Wells, Mercer, and colleagues found more effective collaboration and more reasoned discussion in their intervention groups. Students acknowledged uncertainty and changed their viewpoints (Wegerif, Linares, Rojas-Drummond, Mercer, & Velez, 2005). Findings were corroborated by systematic reviews reporting relationships between student learning and extended, cumulative responses in group interactions where competing viewpoints were expressed and resolution sought (Clarke, Resnick, & Penstein Rosé, 2016; Howe & Abedin, 2013). These studies generated some very useful insights and potentially strong lines of inquiry that subsequent work has pursued in developing TPD programmes to support productive classroom dialogue. However, the story is not completely rosy. In Wells and Arauz’s (2006) seven-year programme, the proportion of dialogic discussion sequences remained low despite increasing in frequency. Much of the pertinent research and development to date has been small-scale and limited relative to outcome measures, and the findings of even the most recent TPD studies have been mixed. We elaborate in the next section.

Which features of dialogue are taken up and which are more resistant to change? TPD programmes for dialogue have met with patchy success. While some studies report unilaterally successful teacher adoption across all target features, others report partial or no impact. Where dialogic practices do develop, how much consistency is there in what features 239

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change? Space precludes a comprehensive overview of studies, but the following findings illustrate the main changes. Positive shifts for teachers have predominantly concerned invitations for students to elaborate and build on ideas (Grau, Calcagni, & Preiss, 2015a;Van der Veen, de Mey, van Kruistum, & van Oers, 2017). Several studies show an increase in teachers’ use of questions stimulating dialogue: open/authentic questions (Chinn, Anderson, & Waggoner, 2001; Nystrand,Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser, & Long, 2003), uptake questions (ibid.; Sedova, Sedlacek, & Svaricek, 2016), invitations for engaging with others’ reasoning (Michaels & O’Connor, 2015), and challenging and scaffolding questions (Gillies, 2015). Teacher–student role changes are evident in the increased use of joint inquiry (Haneda, Teemant, & Sherman, 2017). For students, the most consistent findings are increases in reasoning words (Mercer et al., 2004; Grau al., 2015a), extended and elaborated contributions and explanations (Calcagni, in preparation; Gillies, 2015), elaboration with evidence (Chinn et al., 2001), engagement with multiple perspectives (Haneda et al., 2017), and shifts in viewpoints (Wegerif et al., 2005). Students increase their capabilities for argumentation in some studies (e.g., Wilkinson et al., 2017).1 However focusing on structural aspects of quality argumentation often glosses over validity and persuasiveness (Nussbaum et al., 2018). Dialogic practices are associated with performance on reasoning tests, subject attainment, and student attitudinal measures: see Chapter 13 by Howe, Hennessy, and Mercer, this volume. Alexander, Hardman, and Hardman (2017) reported student learning gains in English, mathematics, and science after a large-scale, randomised control trial of a dialogic teaching intervention with 2,493 9- and 10-year-olds. Specifically, teachers adopted more open-ended questioning, encouraged discussion, and gave more feedback to students. Students listened more to peers, increased confidence, and quieter students were included more. However, even in such successful studies, effect sizes are still rather small. Observations of seven primary teachers in a Chilean study showed increased frequencies of dialogic episodes after one year, in particular, moves relating to reasoning, expression, and elaboration of ideas and invitations for those (Grau, Calcagni, Preiss, & Ortiz, 2015b). However, there was virtually no positioning (disagreement or evaluation of others’ ideas), reference back, or metacognitive reflection. Other studies show more limited success.Alvermann and Hayes’ (1989) six-month intervention with five teachers in an American secondary school resulted in students eliciting more inferential responses from the text but did not effect substantial, lasting changes in classroom interaction patterns. Lefstein and Snell’s (2013) one-year programme assessed teachers’ questions, feedback, and nature of students’ contributions; the sole increase was openness in teachers’ questions. Likewise, Schwarz, Cohen, and Ophir (2017) found that teacher development for guiding argumentation yielded more open questions yet interventions for structuring idea elaboration remained constant.Van der Veen et al. (2017) programme with young children yielded increases in dialogic interaction after TPD focused on talk moves. A metacommunicative move (“I don’t understand what you are saying”) was adopted by some. Students in the intervention condition often came up with unanticipated questions or ideas that deepened their reasoning and guided conversations in new directions. Nevertheless, encouraging a culture of children listening to peers, taking their ideas seriously, was unsuccessful in that study – despite targeted talk moves in the TPD – and the one by Michaels and O’Connor (2015), in contrast with Alexander et al. (2017). Ruthven et al.’s (2017) epiSTEMe intervention assessed teachers inviting explanations, clarifications, and reasoning, as well as students providing reasons and taking extended turns in junior secondary science and maths classes. The (three-day) dialogic teaching intervention yielded no significant increase in students’ learning or change in attitudes. Limitations included 240

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the fact that intervention group teachers were often working alone, despite hopes to include pairs. Another intervention programme implemented over two years in four secondary school science departments by Osborne, Simon, Christodoulou, Howell-Richardson, and Richardson (2013) essentially yielded no significant changes in students’ epistemic beliefs or attainment. In Israel, widespread attempts to create space for active, democratic student participation have promisingly resulted in students’ enthusiastic contribution to lively class discussion and ostensible engagement with others’ ideas. Even there, though, the official voice of the teacher and curriculum remains dominant: Segal, Pollak, and Lefstein (2017, p. 3) describe how the rare independent student voices fade away during “exuberant, voiceless participation”. Addressing the lack of apparent success with dialogic interventions, the use of lesson video recordings as a reflective tool and stimulus for making explicit and developing dialogic approaches has shown some promise. Recording lessons builds on a wider tradition of successful professional development involving video analysis, often within teacher–academic researcher partnerships (Armstrong & Curran, 2006; Borko, Jacobs, Eiteljorg, & Pittman, 2008; Hennessy & Deaney, 2009). This allows viewers to see routine practices afresh and to compare and freely critique a wide range of pedagogical practices (Sherin, 2007). Gröschner, Seidel, Pehmer, and Kiemer (2014) examined the impact of their Dialogic Video Cycle (DVC) programme (two cycles of three workshops and a video recording of the teachers’ lessons over one year). The video reflection group who watched both their own footage and that of colleagues significantly increased in their perceived autonomy support. Teachers’ feedback became more focused on students’ learning processes and self-regulation (Pehmer, Gröschner, & Seidel, 2015). Yet, no change was observed this time in use of teachers’ open-ended questions or students’ responses. Moreover, the goals and outcomes of most TPD interventions seem to converge on increased sharing and elaboration of different ideas by students rather than critical evaluation, known to promote learning as students test their ideas against others’ (Howe & Mercer, 2016; Kuhn, Cheney, & Weinstock, 2000). Critical reasoning underpins the notion of Accountable Talk: speakers are accountable to knowledge and the standards of reason as well as to others (Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008). Work by Sedova, Salamounova, and Svaricek (2016) and others confirms that reasoned coordination of ideas or rational argumentation in general are rarely promoted by teachers or observed in classrooms, even where deliberately targeted in TPD. Wilkinson et al. (2017) set out to develop an evaluatist epistemology (Kuhn et al., 2000) based on rational evaluation of different points of view during “inquiry dialogue” for argument literacy. Despite marked gains in the quality of teachers’ facilitation and students’ argumentation over the year, teachers’ epistemic beliefs did not shift; teachers continued to consider all opinions equally valid and regarded the use of reasons and evidence as idiosyncratic. Wilkinson and et al. concluded that “considerable research remains to be done to identify and test strategies to help practitioners acquire the theoretical, epistemological, and procedural knowledge needed to successfully implement dialogic teaching” (p. 78). This is a major challenge to the field and, as with students’ epistemic beliefs (Osborne et al., 2013), one that has so far proved problematic.

Obstacles faced by dialogic education initiatives: system- and teacher-level factors Why is TPD impact often limited and variable despite the best efforts of researchers and educators? One reason might be that the research community has failed to convince practitioners or policymakers of the value of dialogic pedagogy for supporting knowledge building (Leftstein, 2006). Policy initiatives can actually be obstructive, as was the downgrading of the importance of spoken language in revising the National Curriculum for England (Department for Education 241

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and Schools [DfES], 2013). In sum, talk for effective learning frequently lacks high status or is not assessed on high-stakes tests, as we elaborate further later. Osborne and et al.’s work (2013) indicates that the variable extent and nature of change might be largely due to different school cultures – school policy, departmental culture, and leadership style – along with individual differences in teachers’ expertise, beliefs, priorities, and teaching goals. Also pivotal, in our view, is the lack of opportunities for systematic teacher inquiry into their own practice (Adler, Rougle, Kaiser, & Caughlan, 2003). For deep change in classroom interaction, teachers need to scrutinise their own practices and discrepancies with intended goals, and test new approaches (Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001). Multiple researchers have highlighted the demands on teachers in implementing a dialogic approach as a key reason why dialogue is rare. The social and intellectual work teachers must handle is complex: they are simultaneously managing intelligibility, coherence, student motivation, equity, and time and developing student skills for oracy, interthinking, and reasoned critique (Park et al., 2017, p. 21). Both students and teachers need to shape their contributions in response to others to sustain interaction. Participants must continually work at establishing and maintaining agreement about the topic and purpose of talk, namely “intersubjectivity” (Wells, 2007). They have to interpret another’s perspective and position themselves in relation to it – deciding how far to agree, amplify, qualify, or object (Wells, 1999, pp. 107–108). Ruthven et al. (2017) found that, while teachers commonly succeeded in increasing student contributions, actually making use of students’ ideas was more demanding.The reasons why teachers struggle here remain problematic (Stein, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2015; Wilkinson et al., 2017). Teachers’ knowledge and training in dialogic approaches may focus on productive talk moves rather than developing their own ability to critically evaluate students’ arguments. Another likely explanation is the required change of teacher mindset: a non-trivial shift from traditional practice. The pivotal success factor is not the quantity of classroom dialogue, its continual presence, or use of specific moves, but the teacher’s overall dialogic stance (Wells & Arauz, 2006), allowing fluid and appropriate movement between different types of discussions. Of prime importance is the teacher having a dialogic intention for the task, opening up a dialogic space, listening (Boyd & Markarian, 2011), and fostering student risk taking, empowerment, and participation. Dialogue is founded in authentic relationships of equity and respect across difference, rather than being an instrumental pedagogical tool (CEDiR Group, 2018). Adopting a dialogic stance underpins the teacher’s epistemological orientation towards a genuine commitment to students’ ideas and agency (Davies, Kiemer, & Meissel, 2017). In practice, though, teachers may not consider their students capable of engaging in intellectually challenging discussions (Park et al., 2017) and actively co-constructing knowledge with peers. A dialogic stance needs to be authentic. Dillon (1985) argued that, unless teacher questions convey genuine perplexity, they can inhibit discussion because students perceive that specific answers are expected. Even open questions tended to generate discussion between teacher and students instead of cross-discussion between students (ping-pong versus basketball), whereas statements provoked more extended and interactive student talk. Dawes, Mercer, and Wegerif ’s work (2004) on asking students to agree/disagree with provocative “talking points” confirms statements as a powerful alternative. Finally, teachers might not find TPD initiatives sufficiently informative or persuasive. In our own recent study in English primary and secondary schools, only 19% of 70 participating teachers initially demonstrated a medium or strong understanding of dialogic teaching, despite experience in other relevant TPD sessions (Hennessy, Dragovic, & Warwick, 2017).The majority were unable to offer explicit statements indicating awareness (or importance) of dialogue involving building on others’ responses and exploring different perspectives. In sum, teachers 242

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and students might lack the motivation, understandings, experience, skills, practices, or support to help them move beyond traditional patterns of teacher-led interaction, despite targeted interventions.

Specific issues concerning slow adoption of dialogue in secondary schools While most issues raised in this chapter pertain to school learners across all ages, the majority of the research on dialogic education – including the seminal work by Alexander, Mercer,Wells, and their colleagues – has taken place in primary/elementary schools.While secondary teachers meet specific dialogic initiatives with enthusiasm, there has been little research at secondary level (ages 11–18) to date (Higham, Brindley, & Van De Pol, 2014).The few studies have been located almost entirely in junior secondary or middle school and in the science domain (Coultas, 2006; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Osborne & Chin, 2010; Scott, Ametller, Mortimer, & Emberton, 2010). Hence, in this section we focus on contextual factors affecting the secondary phase of schooling which, of course, operates quite differently, being organised by subjects. Again, both systemic and pedagogical factors might play a role. Burbules (1993) believed that the reasons for the “failure of dialogue” (p. 144) ranged from discouragement of open participation, to crowded classrooms, to exam-oriented instruction. Daniels (2001) argued that schools were far less reflective about what was said than what was written and so downgraded discussion skills. A related issue is the tension for teachers between allowing students’ extended, unfettered exploration of ideas and the need to cover the curriculum in a timely fashion (Howe & Abedin, 2013). A key obstacle identified is the pressure to prepare students for high-stakes assessments (Higham et al., 2014). However, Lefstein (2006) argued that assessment offers no excuse for the lack of dialogue. His research in London schools found that during examination preparation, dialogic indicators dramatically reduced in favour of spoon-feeding, but this did not necessarily raise exam achievement. Likewise, Blazar and Pollard (2017) assert that the relationship between test-preparation activities and lowerquality, less-ambitious instruction (in mathematics) is weaker than assumed; eliminating testing is unlikely to radically improve the average lesson. Some teachers recognise that teaching time initially invested in developing conceptual and procedural knowledge through dialogue allows time savings later on when students can apply this to similar contexts. In sum, research within secondary schools has been somewhat limited in scope and breadth; furthermore, no studies have focused on the distinct challenges and affordances of promoting dialogue in secondary settings nor explored whether the nature of dialogues might be linked to subject epistemology (Higham et al., 2014, p. 88) and consequent differences in dialogic teaching approaches.

Methodological issues undermining impact of TPD programmes for dialogue Some important design and methodological features of TPD programmes themselves may further help to explain why traditional practices are often resistant to intervention and why clear-cut results are rarely obtained. While most contemporary programmes have progressed from the traditional, ineffective top-down model, there is not universal recognition of the need for long enough durations of both input and the period over which change is measured. It is generally accepted that it takes about two years – and sometimes five years – before teachers begin to use any new instructional practices of substance (Timperley, Wilson, Barrar, & Fung, 2007) effectively and develop a deeper understanding of the underlying theory and value.Thus, impact on students 243

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could also be delayed (Osborne et al., 2013). Guskey and Yoon’s (2009) review of TPD educational initiatives indicates that no successful interventions offered less than 30 contact hours nor used a train-the-trainer approach (cascading); they required direct contact. Despite the long-established principle of sustained involvement underlying successful TPD (Guskey & Yoon, 2009; Desimone, 2009), dialogue initiatives can be very short-term interventions and may involve cascading. In our own survey of 46 teachers voluntarily participating in a naturalistic study of classroom dialogue, 48% previously had some form of relevant TPD; this is probably higher than average. However, around half of those experienced only a one-off session lasting less than half a day, and none had had more than five days. In the Osborne et al. (2013) study, despite a two-year timescale, the aim of developing a more dialogic approach to science teaching was (unsuccessfully) addressed through two lead teachers in each school working to embed use of argumentation and to develop their colleagues’ expertise. The researchers considered this school-led approach of using minimal support without extensive TPD and coaching problematic. Furthermore, some of the less successful intervention studies have confirmed the established observations that, with any educational intervention, degree of take-up varies between teachers, as can the starting point – some teachers may already have been exposed to the target approach and students may also vary naturally in their epistemological beliefs (Osborne et al., 2013; Ruthven et al., 2017). Moreover, fidelity and quality of implementation and outcomes might be inconsistent. Fidelity may not be monitored accurately, limiting awareness of quite what was implemented or how often. Then, evidence for the impact on outcomes can be very murky indeed. In those few studies that explore links with student attainment, potentially confounding factors have rarely been adequately identified, measured, and taken into account (see Howe et al., Chapter 13 in this volume). A few studies have reported attainment gains when teachers and students elaborate on others’ ideas and when students explain and justify their ideas (Muhonen, Rasku-Puttonen, Pakarinen, Poikkeus, & Lerkkanen, 2017; Michaels & O’Connor, 2015; Pauli & Reusser, 2015). In Van der Veen et al. (2017) study, oral communicative competence increased, yet children’s subject knowledge did not. These studies are uncommon, however, and it is very difficult to isolate the impact of any particular aspects of dialogue when TPD emphasises multiple aspects together. Moreover, sample sizes and range of outcomes measured (including subject areas) are often limited. Likewise, TPD interventions frequently do not use a robust experimental design. Pehmer et al.’s (2015) comparison of a dialogic programme with an “Advanced Traditional Programme” offered one exception, but teachers themselves chose which programme to follow; this could have inflated emerging differences. In sum, without carefully controlled studies – infrequent and indeed, extremely hard to engineer in the real world of schools – it is hard to draw firm conclusions or causal links. Moreover, the field is not helped by the lack of consistency – and sometimes clarity – concerning the goals of dialogic teaching, which variously emphasise agency, argumentation skills, and subject learning.

Sustainability While changes in practice are often observed through TPD programmes for dialogue, these may not become embedded. The long-term impact of programmes has rarely been investigated through follow-up studies. A key exception is the follow-up conducted after an eight-week in-service programme on scaffolding argumentation in which teachers reflected on their guidance of small group discussions on texts around moral dilemmas (Schwarz et al., 2017).The quality of guidance and the accountability and argumentativeness of talk progressively improved in group discussions and consequently snowballed to whole-class discussions as groups shared 244

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their learning from the private arena. Encouragingly, the effects persisted for six months after the intervention. In one of our own studies, we were fortunate enough to be able to observe two teachers’ lessons ten weeks after the programme ended (Hennessy et al., 2017). Teachers continued to use a dialogic approach, posing open-ended questions and encouraging students to reason and build on others’ ideas. However, it is uncertain whether other participants likewise sustained their practices beyond the intervention period.

Scalability As already mentioned, deep pedagogical change of any kind requires extensive time investment, even where teachers themselves act as researchers (Sinnema & Aitken, 2015). Ironically, this investment from researchers and teachers requires longer periods or greater intensity than most schools could realistically devote. For example, Haneda et al. (2017) offered a 30-hour summer workshop and seven cycles of individualised coaching in classrooms, working with only one teacher. Alexander et al. (2017) undertook 20 weeks of intensive intervention (and teachers wanted more). Wilkinson et al. (2017) offered two six-hour workshop days, biweekly/ monthly meetings with teachers, and monthly individual coaching.Van der Veen et al. (2017) ran two workshops and two eight-week cycles of weekly lesson observations and video reflections. Calcagni (in preparation), Grau et al. (2015a), Gröschner and colleagues (2014), and Sedova et al. (2016) each provided a programme over one school year. Matsumura and Garnier (2015) offered weekly group meetings and monthly individual coaching in classrooms over two years, improving discussion quality with respectable effect sizes. Further studies in which university researchers worked with small numbers of classroom teachers quite intensively and collaboratively (e.g., Adler et al., 2003; Christodolou & Osborne 2014; Hennessy,Warwick, & Mercer, 2011) showed substantial change towards more dialogic practices and a shift in classroom power relations; importantly, they maximised sustainability through regular, personalised input. However such staffing ratios are really only feasible within funded school–university partnerships. The issue of scalability of any of these research-based initiatives on dialogic education thus arises (Howe & Mercer, 2016). How viable is it to roll out such programmes without substantial funding and sustained external input? Our own team’s promising strategies in recent studies carried out in Chile (Calcagni, in preparation) and sub-Saharan Africa (Haßler, Hennessy, & Hofmann, 2018) include inducting peer facilitators who can work with their colleagues in a sustained way using carefully structured, extensive, open multimedia materials with minimal external support – but facilitation support was built into the materials themselves. Fidelity was monitored through regular reporting by facilitators and workshop audio recordings. Osborne et al. (2013) argue that testing any kind of intervention at scale must require teacher participation; our intensive study in Zambia over one school year involved all teachers in Grades 4–6 in one school. Degree of take-up once again varied; however, all 12 participants developed more interactive and dialogic practices, and their thinking shifted to some extent. This kind of model may not be feasible or successful in all contexts of course, and it remains to be seen how well it can scale up. Nevertheless, we found that development of such permanently accessible, open materials facilitated making explicit and clear the theoretical rationale and research evidence underlying the new approach, a key success factor highlighted by Osborne and colleagues (2013, p. 338). Our unique video exemplars of authentic practice2 filmed in typical, very low-resourced African classrooms proved enormously important in engaging teachers working in similar settings. These are powerful tools when combined with opportunities for iterative design, trial and refinement of practice, and reflection on the experiences, as confirmed in our subsequent study engaging 70 UK teachers in video-stimulated workshop discussions and with a multimedia 245

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resource bank (Hennessy et al., 2017). Preparation of the research-informed multimedia materials requires significant effort and up-front cost, though.

Exemplars We now present two examples from our own teams’ work that develop some of the themes and obstacles aired earlier. A secondary school example of an innovative TPD approach in New Zealand demonstrates a shift towards students’ autonomy over their dialogic discussion and reflection on its quality.The primary level Chilean study achieved marked success in changing teachers’ subject pedagogy through peer-facilitated, video-stimulated TPD workshops.

Exemplar 1: Quality Talk in the secondary school Davies et al. (2017) contend that, in secondary schools, because of the importance of students being empowered to gain confidence in articulating arguments and contribute to complex discussions, they should be taught the principles of Quality Talk (Wilkinson et al., 2010), and teachers should remain mostly absent from the group discussions. However, in Davies et al.’s model, teachers played an important role in reinforcing the value of dialogue and coaching productive talk moves. Following such coaching, “fishbowl” activities involved a group of students trialling a group discussion before their peers who provided constructive criticism. Innovatively, students were given transcripts of their own discussions and audio-taped discussing how well (or not) they had used the recommended talk moves to foster more complex, robust discussions. This technique appeared successful in accelerating the speed of uptake of moves because students were confronted with their tendencies to lose focus and disrupt the dialogic flow by interrupting peers. Results of the intervention study over a school year showed significant increases in: usage of authentic, uptake and high-level questioning of peers, frequency of dialogic episodes (confirming Nystrand et al.’s [2003] findings), and use of critical analytical thinking in students’ writing (Davies & Meissel, 2016). Davies et al.’s (2017) recommendation that teachers avoid participating in group discussions was because transcripts revealed that if a teacher interrupted a group discussion, dialogic talk immediately reduced, even when the teacher asked authentic, uptake, or high-level questions. However, participation and rigour are in tension. Absence of a skilful facilitator “can actually reinforce poor reasoning, since such reasoning will pass unnoticed and hence unchecked” (Gardner, 2015, p. 72). Criteria for coding an episode as Exploratory Talk demanded that students not only included a challenge or disagreement, but the challenge resulted in a new shared understanding (Mercer & Dawes, 2010).Yet only very capable and confident students managed to pose challenges to peers. Students in all classes maintained that they had enjoyed challenging each other, though. These results are not unexpected as changing norms of behaviour in dialogue is known to take time (Hofmann & Ruthven, 2018), particularly in low socio-economic classes where asymmetrical power and privilege relations (McLaren, Macrine, & Hill, 2010) can influence participation levels.

Exemplar 2: Reflective practice, iterative development, and classroom trialling Our own approach to helping teachers develop more dialogic approaches draws on wider models of effective TPD that encourage collaboration and dialogue with peers, observation, and feedback. These models include experiential workshop activities and iterative classroom trial246

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ling focused on immediate teaching needs (Cordingley et al., 2003; Desimone, 2009; Dudley et al., 2019; Twining et al., 2013; J. G. Wells, 2007). Teachers’ design of new approaches is stimulated through review of carefully selected video exemplars, again including footage of teachers’ own classrooms and of unknown teachers, with open-ended prompts for critical reflection. Collaborative analysis of critical episodes by teachers and academic researchers helps to make theory – including dialogism – explicit to teachers and to recontextualise and adapt it for new settings (Hennessy, 2014; Hennessy et al., 2011). A doctoral student, Elisa Calcagni, recently undertook a study with similar underpinnings.

A one-year TPD programme in Chile An evidence-based TPD intervention was conducted in three primary schools in Chile over the course of a school year with the aim of promoting dialogic, mathematics whole-class teaching (Calcagni, in preparation). Ten in-school teacher meetings employed joint reflection on written materials and video examples featuring ground rules, talk moves, and inclusive turn taking. Teachers engaged in collective planning, implementing, and videoing of whole-class activities fostering dialogue. Design features deliberately targeting sustainability and scalability included peer facilitation employing given materials with only occasional external support and, consequently, low implementation costs. Detailed facilitator support guides described the sessions’ goals and activities and offered suggestions regarding how to facilitate discussion; however, time to access them before sessions was unfortunately limited. Data collection involved video recordings of lessons and TPD sessions, written video observation protocols, and interviews. Two groups (n = 4, n = 5) completed the programme whereas one group (n = 9) dropped out halfway through. School leadership support, especially regarding time allocation, and links to their own institutional goals, alongside teacher-facilitators’ commitment to sustain the project, appeared to differentiate the schools that completed the project. Systematic coding of classroom videos of the nine remaining teachers showed a significant increase in both students’ and teachers’ dialogic moves, particularly elaboration and references beyond the dialogue. Teachers’ perceptions shifted to focus on dialogic aspects of interaction when critiquing classroom videos, especially noticing the forms that play a specific role in mathematics teaching, such as jointly verifying results or teachers withholding evaluations of students’ responses. The TPD had an encouragingly positive impact overall on target practices and perceptions. Again, however, not all teachers had the same starting point or learning pathway.

Conclusions and recommendations Dialogic teaching is highly cognitively demanding and requires, for many, a radical shift in beliefs about the value of talk and the teacher–student relationship.TPD programmes in dialogic teaching have struggled to overcome the demands along with a range of systemic, pedagogical, epistemological, and logistical obstacles to change. Some marked successes are evident. However, we consider that the research and development to date in this area has been somewhat limited in both scope and scale, the methodologies and reports have been of variable strength, and the findings are mixed and relate inconsistently to specific features of dialogue. It is thus often very difficult to know how and why any learning outcomes or changes in practices have been achieved. There is much still to learn, for example concerning what duration and intensity of TPD are necessary and sufficient for change. We need more knowledge about the nuances of critical features and mechanisms of change underlying successful programmes (Osborne, 2015) and 247

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whether they vary with context (e.g., subject or school culture). Little is known about whether the shift in students’ abilities to adopt target talk moves is developmental or dependent on the teacher’s degree of dialogic stance, students’ and teachers’ levels of motivation and engagement, temperament, social capital, and other factors. Our recommendations for further research include: •• ••

••

•• •• ••

Sustainability. There is a pressing need to investigate the long-term impact of TPD programmes through follow-up studies after intervention. Scaling up. Guidance for peer facilitators could be explored further; while fidelity is an issue, interactions among colleagues might be more symmetrical than those with academic researchers. Whole-school programmes are necessary to achieve authentic, sustained progression in practices and thinking (Alexander et al., 2017). Fundamental to success is the teacher’s dialogic stance; TPD is not simply a matter of exposure to new models. Rather, allowing time for developing understanding and appreciation of the value – hence theory – of dialogic approaches for learning is imperative. Teacher reviewing of video footage of practice is a promising tool to influence not only pedagogy but beliefs. The role of metacognitive reflection for students (Davies et al., 2017), rarely observed, remains hazy but seems likely to support critical evaluation of ideas and render changes in viewpoint more salient. Motivation to engage in dialogue is important for students, particularly adolescents. Eliciting rich dialogue requires topics that are controversial or provocative (Davies & Meissel, 2016). A conducive classroom climate is essential, with practised routines and clear ground rules, and crucially, valuing of respectful, dialogic interaction (Hennessy et al., 2011).

Nearly 40 years after Gordon Wells strongly advocated for talk to be valued, productive dialogue remains rarely observed. We need creative new ways to develop evaluatist epistemology in both teachers and students. Although Exploratory Talk, Accountable Talk, and Quality Talk involve more than expressing, elaborating, asking uptake and high-level questions, and building on ideas, these seem to be the moves that students and teachers are willing to adjust. The cognitively much harder dialogue moves of making claims with convincing justification or challenging evidence in a text or others’ claims require analysing, not just producing, arguments and continue to be elusive. Without these, limited change in learning outcomes will likely persist. Yet the purpose of dialogical discussions is not necessarily to gain domain knowledge but rather to question the validity of the knowledge, consider alternative views, and habitually become practised at critically thinking through dialogue about the ideas presented in any classroom (Davies, Kiemer, & Dalgleish, 2018) or, indeed, any context. Epilogue. To address some ongoing challenges identified in this chapter, especially sustainability and scalability, we are currently scaling up impact of our prior TPD studies by trialling, across diverse contexts, an extensive resource pack supporting collaborative, reflective teacherled inquiry. The Teacher Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (T-SEDA) and bespoke observation tools (bit.ly/T-SEDA) highlight those elements of dialogue emerging as strongly related to student outcomes in our recent large-scale naturalistic study (see Howe et al., Chapter 13 in this volume). However, teachers choose their own inquiry focus and target dialogic practices. Documenting TPD arrangements that suit each setting should yield messages concerning optimal ways of engaging practitioners and pathways to impact. Importantly, we can explore the tension between teacher autonomy, agency, and ownership, and the degree of structure and support necessary to maintain momentum – currently still an open question. 248

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Notes 1 Our own naturalistic research suggested that prior experience of TPD related to dialogue may have an impact on frequency of reasoning moves but not on elaboration (including invitations in each case): Vrikki and colleagues (2018). 2 See the videos of dialogic practice offered by the TERC Inquiry Project (http://inquiryproject.terc. edu/).

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Sara Hennessy and Maree Davies Park, J. Y., Michaels, S., Arancibia, E., Diaz Lembert, D., Dimanche, S., Moon, A., & Sanchez, K. (2017). Poetry inside out as multiliteracies pedagogy: An inquiry by youth researchers and university researchers. In F. Serafini & E. Gee (Eds.), Remixing Multiliteracies: Theory and Practice from New London to New Times (pp. 62–73). New York: Teachers College Press. Pauli, C., & Reusser, K. (2015). Discursive cultures of learning in (everyday) mathematics teaching: A video-based study on mathematics teaching in German and Swiss classrooms. In L. B. Resnick, C. S. C. Asterhan & S. N. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 181–193). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Pehmer, A. K., Gröschner, A., & Seidel, T. (2015). Fostering and scaffolding student engagement in productive classroom discourse: Teachers’ practice changes and reflections in light of teachers’ professional development. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 7, 12–27. Rojas-Drummond, S., Littleton, K., Hernández, F., & Zúñiga, M. (2010). Dialogical interactions among peers in collaborative writing contexts. Chapter 7. In K. Littleton & C. Howe (Eds.), Educational Dialogues: Understanding and Promoting Productive Interaction (pp. 128–148). Abingdon: Routledge. Ruthven, K., Mercer, N., Taber, K. S., Guardia, P., Hofmann, R., Ilie, S., … , & Riga, F. (2017). A researchinformed dialogic-teaching approach to early secondary school mathematics and science: The pedagogical design and field trial of the epiSTEMe intervention. Research Papers in Education, 32(1), 18–40. Schwarz, B. B., Cohen, I., & Ophir Y. (2017). The epidemic effect of scaffolding argumentation in small groups to whole-class teacher-led argumentation. In F. Arcidiacono & A. Bova (Eds.), Interpersonal Argumentation in Educational and Professional Contexts (pp. 95–115). New York: Springer. Scott, P., Ametller, J., Mortimer, E., & Emberton, J. (2010). Teaching and learning disciplinary knowledge: Developing the dialogic space for an answer when there isn’t even a question. Chapter 14. In K. Littleton & C. Howe (Eds.), Educational Dialogues: Understanding and Promoting Productive Interaction (pp. 289–303). Abingdon: Routledge. Sedova, K., Sedlacek, M., & Svaricek, R. (2016).Teacher professional development as a means of transforming student classroom talk. Teaching and Teacher Education, 57, 14–25. Segal, A., Pollak, I., & Lefstein, A. (2017). Democracy, voice and dialogic pedagogy:The struggle to be heard and heeded. Language and Education, 31(1), 6–25. Sherin, M. (2007). New perspectives on the role of video in teacher education. In J. Brophy (Ed.), Advances in Research on Teaching (Vol. 10, pp. 1–27). Bingley: Emerald. Sinnema, C., & Aitken, G. A. (2015). Teaching as inquiry. In M. Hill & D. Fraser (Eds.), The Professional Practice of Teaching in New Zealand (pp. 79–97). South Melbourne: Cengage Learning Australia. Smith, F., Hardman, F.,Wall, K., & Mroz, M. (2004). Interactive whole class teaching in the national literacy and numeracy strategies. British Educational Research Journal, 30(3), 395–411. Stein, M. K., Engle, R. A., Smith, M. S., & Hughes, E. K. (2015). Orchestrating productive mathematical discussion: Helping teachers learn to better incorporate student thinking. Socializing intelligence through academic talk and dialogue. Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 10(4), 313–340. Timperley, H., Wilson, A., Barrar, H., & Fung, I. (2007). Teacher Professional Learning and Development: Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration (BES). Wellington: Ministry of Education. Twining, P., Raffaghelli, J., Albion, P., & Knezek, D. (2013). Moving education into the digital age: The contribution of teachers’ professional development. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 29(5), 426–437. Van der Veen, C., de Mey, L., van Kruistum, C., & van Oers, B. (2017). The effect of productive classroom talk and metacommunication on young children’s oral communicative competence: An intervention study in early childhood education. Learning and Instruction, 48, 14–22. Vrikki, M.,Wheatley, L., Howe, C., Hennessy, S., & Mercer, N. (2018). Dialogic practices in primary school classrooms. Language and Education. doi:10.1080/09500782.2018.1509988 Wegerif, R., Linares, J., Rojas-Drummond, S., Mercer, N., & Velez, M. (2005). “Thinking together” in the UK and Mexico: Transfer of an educational innovation. Journal of Classroom Interaction, 40(1), 40–47. Wegerif, R., Mercer, N., & Dawes, L. (1999). From social interaction to individual reasoning: An empirical investigation of a possible socio-cultural model of cognitive development. Learning & Instruction, 9(6), 493–516. Wells, G. (1989). 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Professional development for dialogue Wells, G. (2009). The Meaning Makers: Learning to Talk and Talking to Learn (2nd edn). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Wells, G., & Arauz, R. M. (2006). Dialogue in the classroom. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 15(3), 379–428. Wells, J. G. (2007). Key design factors in durable instructional technology professional development. Journal of Technology and Teacher Education, 15(1), 101–118. Wilkinson, I. A., Soter, A. O., & Murphy, K. P. (2010). Developing a model of quality talk about literary text. In M. G. McKeown & L. Kucan (Eds.), Bringing Reading Researchers to Life: Essays in Honor of Isabel L. Beck (pp. 142–169). New York: Guilford Press. Wilkinson, I. A. G., Reznitskaya, A., Bourdage, K., Oyler, J., Glina, M., Drewry, R., et al. (2017). Toward a more dialogic pedagogy: Changing teachers’ beliefs and practices through professional development in language arts classrooms. Language and Education, 31(1), 65–82.

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18 DESIGNING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT TO SUPPORT TEACHERS’ FACILITATION OF ARGUMENTATION Alina Reznitskaya and Ian A. G. Wilkinson

Teaching students how to argue well has been an historic ambition of American schooling. In the early 20th century, the philosopher and educational reformer, John Dewey, maintained that schools must cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions; to develop a lively, sincere, and open-minded preference for conclusions that are properly grounded, and to ingrain into the individual’s working habits methods of inquiry and reasoning appropriate to the various problems that present themselves. Dewey (1910, p. 28) The need to acquire such “habits of mind” has only been intensified in today’s information-rich, globalized, and rapidly changing world characterized by proliferation of multiple, competing, and, at times, false claims to knowledge. The latest Common Core Initiative in the US, for example, positions argumentation skills as “critical to college and career readiness” and “broadly important for the literate, educated person” (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & The Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010, pp. 24–25). Contemporary scholars agree that argumentation skills are best developed through participation in a classroom dialogue, during which students ask challenging questions, justify their views, and evaluate the credibility of reasons and evidence (Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Newell et al., 2011; Wells, 2000). One commonly used justification for this position is based on sociocultural theories (e.g., Vygotsky, 1968) that view learning as a process of internalization of “cultural tools,” or new ways of speaking, acting, and thinking (Alexander, 2006; Anderson et al., 2001; Cole & Wertsch, 1996). By participating in classroom dialogue centred on argumentation, students are expected to observe, practice, and eventually internalize argumentation skills and to acquire more robust and personally meaningful knowledge. In fact, several studies have documented that engaging in argumentation with others improves student reasoning, argumentative writing, inferential comprehension of text, and conceptual understanding of disciplinary con254

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cepts and principles (Dong, Anderson, Li, & Kim, 2008; Gorard, Siddiqui, & See, 2015; Kuhn & Crowell, 2011; Mercer, Wegerif, & Dawes, 1999). Unfortunately, learning to conduct discussions centred on argumentation often presents a serious challenge for teachers (McNeill & Knight, 2013; Nguyen,Anderson,Waggoner, & Rowel, 2007; O’Connor & Snow, 2018). It requires a substantial shift in their knowledge, beliefs, and practices (Hammer & Schifter, 2001; Windschitl, 2002). Effective facilitators of group argumentation should be able to track students’ arguments, recognize their strength and weaknesses, and share this recognition with the group through strategically chosen discourse moves (Kennedy, 2013). They need to be knowledgeable, creative, and flexible and able to make moment-tomoment decisions that best support student learning. This is a new type of engagement for many teachers, and “it comes with different and strenuous intellectual demands” (Hammer & Schifter, 2001, p. 442). In this chapter, we describe a year-long professional development programme designed to help teachers facilitate discussions about texts that engage primary school students in collaborative and rigorous argumentation. We begin by presenting key considerations that guided our professional development efforts, including the characteristics of talk we aimed to promote in the classroom and the role of teacher epistemic cognition. We then relate these considerations to previous professional development interventions that informed our work. Next, we discuss the professional development programme we developed. We conclude the chapter by reflecting on the findings and features of our programme that can guide future implementation of professional development to support teachers’ adoption of new discourse practices aimed at facilitating quality argumentation.

Key considerations Dialogue characteristics We broadly framed our professional development in terms of Alexander’s (2006, 2018) concept of dialogic teaching, which includes a set of principles, justifications, repertoires of talk, and classroom indicators to support students’ learning and autonomy. Alexander’s (2018) notion of dialogic teaching “rejects the view that there is one right way to maximise talk’s quality and power” (p. 3), instead proposing that teachers need to “develop a broad repertoire of talk-based pedagogical skills and strategies and to draw on these to expand and refine the talk repertoires and capacities of their students” (p. 4). Our professional development programme aimed to help teachers expand their repertoire of talk, specifically focusing on the type of discourse that supports the development of students’ argumentation. To identify the normative type of discourse best suited for the goal of supporting argumentation development, we drew on the work of Walton (1992, 1998, 2007) and Gregory (2007b). According to Walton (1998), argumentation happens in different conversational contexts, or dialogue types, which have “distinctive goals and methods used by the participants to achieve these goals” (p. 3). Walton developed a taxonomy of six dialogue types – inquiry, persuasion, negotiation, information-seeking, deliberation, and quarrel – and he described normative protocols for engagement within each type. Gregory (2007b), who applied Walton’s work to education, suggested that inquiry dialogue is most suited to promoting reasoned argumentation. The goal of inquiry dialogue is to collaboratively search for the most reasonable answer to a contestable question. Inquiry begins with an open question that invites the generation and testing of multiple perspectives. During inquiry dialogue, participants explore, test, coordinate, and integrate ideas in search for the most justifiable conclusion. That is, inquiry compels participants not only 255

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to defend their own positions and critically examine those of others (as in persuasion) but also to give up or qualify their viewpoints in the face of previously overlooked evidence or faulty reasoning (Gregory, 2007b). As a result, inquiry dialogue entails a systematic movement towards the truth (even if truth remains an unreachable ideal), and it relies on epistemic commitments and evaluation standards that support such movement (Gardner, 2015; Gregory, 2007b). Another key assumption we made in our work was that teachers should play an important role during inquiry dialogue and provide scaffolding to support students’ efforts to engage in argumentation. Consistent with recent literature (see van de Pol,Volman, & Beishuizen, 2010 for a review), we viewed scaffolding as contingent, meaning that it is tailored to students’ needs, and fading, meaning that responsibility for control of the discourse is gradually transferred to students. Because most students, especially those in primary grades, are not proficient in argumentation (Fischer et al., 2014; Means & Voss, 1996; Newell et al., 2011; Sadler, 2004), we assumed that the initial teacher involvement in discussions needed to be high; teachers should constantly monitor the quality of students’ arguments and intervene as necessary to model and promote the norms and criteria of argumentation that characterize inquiry dialogue. As pointed out by Gardner (2015), lack of quality facilitation by teachers “can actually reinforce poor reasoning, since such reasoning will pass unnoticed and hence unchecked” (p. 72). To better understand how teachers can systematically scaffold student engagement in argumentation, we drew on a variety of resources, including empirical studies of classroom discourse and teacher facilitation (e.g., Billings & Fitzgerald, 2002; Nussbaum & Ordene, 2011; Nystrand, Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser, & Long, 2003; Soter et al., 2008), as well as instructional materials developed by proponents of established educational models centred on argumentation, such as Collaborative Reasoning (Waggoner, Chinn, Yi, & Anderson, 1995). However, our understanding of facilitation was most informed by the pedagogical literature from Philosophy for Children, an educational environment designed by philosophers with an explicit goal of supporting argumentation within a “community of inquiry” (Gregory, 2007a; Kennedy, 2004; Lipman, Sharp, & Oscanyon, 1980; Splitter & Sharp, 1996). Drawing on this work, we assumed that teacher scaffolding should address procedural, rather than substantive aspects of discussion (Splitter & Sharp, 1996). This means that instead of correcting students’ answers, teachers should primarily focus on “strengthening the procedures of inquiry” by attending to the norms and criteria of quality argumentation characteristic of this type of dialogue (Splitter & Sharp, 1996, p. 301).

Teacher epistemic cognition In our research, we also assumed that in order for teachers to become effective facilitators of inquiry dialogue, they need to develop epistemic cognition that is consistent with the norms, criteria, and practices of this type of discourse. Recent studies reveal that epistemic cognition, defined as thinking about knowledge construction and justification, plays an important role in shaping teachers’ practices (Brownlee, Schraw, & Berthelsen, 2011; Johnston, Woodside-Jiron, & Day, 2001; Kang, 2008; Maggioni & Parkinson, 2008; Muis & Foy, 2010; Windschitl, 2002). For example, Johnston et al. (2001) analyzed the lessons of two fourth-grade teachers who held contrasting beliefs about knowledge and knowing. They observed dramatic differences in the teachers’ instruction, including differences in power relations and interactions with students. The teacher who believed in a single truth and unquestionable authority relied solely on traditional recitation, whereas the teacher with a “constructed knower” (Johnston et al., 2001, p. 225) epistemology shared authority with students and engaged in research and discussion activities, during which students explored and critiqued each other’s ideas. 256

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Hence, we assumed that certain beliefs about knowledge may either support or impede teacher implementation and continued use of inquiry dialogue in a classroom (Bråten, Muis, & Reznitskaya, 2017). We drew on models of epistemological development, which suggest that people progress from a simple view of knowledge as static and known by authorities to a more nuanced understanding of knowledge as socially constructed through reasoning (for reviews, see Hofer, 2001; Schraw, 2001). Following Kuhn’s (1991) framework that classified epistemic commitments into three types – absolutists, multiplists, and evaluatists – we identified the types of epistemic cognition that would be more and less adaptive for effective facilitation of inquiry dialogue (Wilkinson, Reznitskaya, Oyler et al., 2017). For example, teachers at the “absolutist” level, who view knowledge as fixed, certain, and existing independently of human cognition (Kuhn, 1991), would not recognize the value of engaging their students in discussion of alternative viewpoints. Further, teachers with “multiplist” beliefs, who do not appreciate the legitimacy of expertise and maintain that knowledge is entirely subjective (Kuhn, 1991), would be less likely to press their students to examine the acceptability of evidence presented in support of a given position. On the other hand,“evaluatists,” who agree on the existence of norms and criteria that make some judgments more sound than others (Kuhn, 1991), would be more likely to engage in critical discussion of alternative propositions aimed at figuring out which one is the most reasonable. Thus, we proposed that having evaluatist epistemology would be more congruent with teacher adoption and use of advocated practices during inquiry dialogue.

Previous professional development efforts In designing our professional development programme, we consulted many previous studies aimed at changing classroom discourse to make it more dialogic, including those in which researchers engaged in a systematic examination of their efforts (e.g., Hennessy, Mercer, & Warwick, 2011; Juzwik, Sherry, Caughlan, Heintz, & Borsheim-Black, 2012; Kucan, 2007; Lefstein & Snell, 2015; Michaels & O’Connor, 2015; Pehmer, Gröschner, & Seidel, 2015). From this research, we learned about several core features of effective programmes, such as having professional development exemplify dialogic teaching, engaging teachers in critical reflection about their practice through collaborative analysis of video, using instructional resources that describe desirable discourse practices and specific talk moves, and having teachers take part in the co-planning of lessons. Learning about these core features provided much-needed guidance for the design of our professional development programme. However, studies aimed to support dialogic teaching typically have a much broader focus than that required in our research. These studies were largely designed to change traditional power structures and related discourse patterns, giving students more opportunities to use talk for learning and to do so in more collaborative and cognitively demanding contexts (Michaels & O’Connor, 2015; Snell & Lefstein, 2011). For example, Hennessy et al. (2011) sought to promote dialogic teaching through teacher use of “open-ended higher-order questioning, reformulating, reflecting, and interpreting” (p. 1910). Although their study supported classroom interactions during which “teachers and learners actively comment and build on each other’s ideas and reasoning collaboratively” (p. 1910), the professional development did not specifically focus on the norms, structures, and criteria for argumentation. Hence, another useful resource was research on professional development aimed specifically at helping teachers enhance their knowledge of argumentation (e.g., McDonald & Heck, 2012; McNeill & Knight, 2013; Osborne, Erduran, & Simon, 2004; Simon, Erduran, & Osborne, 2006). Much of this research has been conducted in science classrooms and focused on developing materials and environments that increase the use of argumentation for learning disciplinary 257

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knowledge. Although these studies paid less attention to scaffolding of discussions, they revealed effective strategies for engaging teachers in learning about argumentation. For example, many researchers relied on the Toulmin (1958) model to introduce teachers to the overall structure and essential elements of arguments and to involve them in a systematic evaluation of student performance (e.g., McNeill & Knight, 2013; Osborne et al., 2004). In our research, we too used Toulmin’s model to help teachers learn about the structure of arguments, identify arguments in students’ discourse, and assess their strengths and weaknesses. Our professional development efforts were also informed by the emerging research on educational interventions that support changes in teacher epistemic cognition (for reviews see Maggioni & Parkinson, 2008; Schraw, Brownlee, & Berthelsen, 2011). Instructional methods that hold promise for teacher change include explicit reflection, inquiry into controversial issues, discussion of classroom dilemmas, and the study of teachers’ own practices in relation to epistemic cognition. For example, Lunn Brownlee, Ferguson, and Ryan (2017) suggest that teachers should engage in a cyclical process of “reflexivity,” during which they identify and reflect on problems of practice, experiment with a possible solution through implementing it in a classroom, and engage in reflection on its effectiveness. We observed that the instructional strategies for promoting changes in epistemic cognition were remarkably similar to those advocated by researchers of interventions in dialogic teaching and argumentation.Thus, we expected that a year-long professional development programme, in which teachers learned to facilitate truth-seeking dialogue through argumentation, would also support changes in teacher epistemic cognition. To conclude, our professional development programme was informed by many prior efforts to promote changes in teachers’ thinking and practices. At the same time, the specific assumptions we made about the dialogue type, teacher scaffolding, and the role of teacher epistemic cognition presented us with unique challenges with no readily available solutions. In the following sections, we describe how we worked to address these challenges.

Professional development programme in facilitating inquiry dialogue Overview of research We conducted the research and professional development project over three years at public schools in two US states, Ohio and New Jersey (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2015; Wilkinson, Reznitskaya, Oyler et al., 2017). Each year constituted a new iteration of the professional development programme, and, each year, we worked with a new cohort of teachers to identify and organize activities that supported teachers’ learning to facilitate inquiry dialogue. A total of 49 fifth-grade language arts teachers participated in this research over the three years. In Years 1 and 2, we used a design study approach (Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc, 2004; Shavelson, Phillips, Towne, & Feuer, 2003; Teti et al., 2008). We worked collaboratively with 23 teachers to design an intervention that was sufficiently robust to address the multiple challenges and competing priorities faced by practitioners teaching in primary school classrooms. In Years 1 and 2, using a single-group pre-test–post-test design, we developed and trialled instructional materials and activities with teachers, collected data on their effectiveness, and made revisions for the next iteration. In Year 3, we tested the final version of our professional development programme using a pre–post-test quasi-experimental design, in which 26 teachers were randomly assigned to treatment conditions.Teachers in the experimental condition (n = 14) participated in the professional development intervention. Teachers in the control condition (n = 12) received the same student texts as those used in experimental classrooms, but they did not receive any guidance in how to 258

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conduct discussions. To collect pre-intervention data, we videotaped two discussions in all classrooms in September of  Year 3. We also assessed teachers’ epistemic cognition using the Reflective Judgment Interview developed by King and Kitchener (1994). From October through May, we implemented the professional development in experimental classrooms, using a combination of workshops, study group meetings, and individual coaching sessions with teachers. In May, we again videotaped two discussions and assessed teachers’ epistemic cognition. We collected audio recordings of all professional development activities. In addition, to learn more about teachers’ reactions to the professional development, we conducted a total of three one-hour focus-group interviews (in November, January, and May) with teachers from the experimental classrooms. During the interviews, teachers were asked to critically discuss their experience with the professional development and suggest ideas for improvement. We transcribed and analyzed study group meetings, two randomly selected coaching sessions per teacher, and the focus-group interviews using NVivo 11 (QSR, 2018) to identify teachers’ views of the professional development. The unit of analysis was the speaking turn. Codes were developed a priori and inductively and comprised both content nodes capturing teachers’ comments or questions about the programme (e.g., coaching, practical issues) and evaluative nodes capturing their attitudes toward the programme (i.e., helpful, difficult).

Professional development in Year 3 The instructional activities used in the final professional development programme are shown in Table 18.1. The programme offered a total of 36 contact hours to participating teachers and lasted from October through May. It began with two workshops, about two weeks apart. After the first

Table 18.1 Overview of Year 3 professional development programme Timing

Activity

Hours

Summary

October/ November

Workshops

2 full-day workshops, 7 hours each = 14 hours

November through March

Study group meetings

November through May January and May

Individual coaching

6 after-school meetings, 2 hours each = 12 hours 6 sessions, 40 minutes each = 4 hours 2 half-day workshops, 3 hours each = 6 hours

•• Introduced key concepts, including dialogic teaching, inquiry dialogue, argument structure, and criteria for evaluating arguments •• Engaged in co-planning discussions •• Practiced tracking arguments using video and transcripts •• Participated in reflection and analysis of teachers’ practice •• Engaged in co-planning discussions

Half-day workshop

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•• Viewed, reflected on, and analyzed videos of teacher’s own discussions with the help of a discourse coach •• Participated in reflection and analysis of practice •• Engaged in co-planning discussions •• Practiced tracking arguments using video and transcripts

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workshop, we asked teachers to conduct inquiry dialogue with their students before the next meeting and at least once per month through the rest of the school year. During the first two workshops, we discussed key concepts and principles of dialogic teaching, inquiry dialogue, and argumentation. We focused on the structure of an argument, including components originally proposed by Toulmin (1958), such as positions, reasons, and warrants (termed “links” in our programme), as well as other components that reflected the dialogic nature of argumentation, such as challenges and responses to challenges. In addition, we reviewed four criteria for evaluating arguments: diversity of perspectives, clarity, acceptability of reasons and evidence, and logical validity. These criteria represent well-established standards of formal and informal logic, as well as the principles proposed by argumentation scholars to reflect the quality of naturally occurring arguments (e.g., Billing, 1987; Ennis, 1996; Govier, 2010; Hollihan & Baaske, 1973; Nielsen, 2013; Toulmin, 1958; Walton, 1996). We explained and operationalized the four criteria using an instructional and assessment instrument we developed, called the Argumentation Rating Tool (ART) (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017). Table 18.2 displays an overview of the ART, in which we connected the four argumentation criteria to 11 discourse practices that can be used to address these criteria. As an example, the second criterion in Table 18.2 is “Clarity,” and it focuses on the precision of wording and the transparency of argument structures. That is, during inquiry dialogue, students should clarify the intended meanings of the words they use, avoid vagueness and ambiguity, make apparent the connections between different ideas presented in their arguments, and understand how these ideas fit into an overall argument structure and relate to the question under consideration. Using the ART, an effective facilitator would continually reflect on students’ argumentation during the discussion, diagnose any problems with clarity, and intervene using the discourse practices (4, 5, 6, and 7) that are most suited to addressing the problem(s). In the ART, we provided a detailed description of each of the 11 discourse practices, using a 6-point rating scale to capture different levels of performance. We explained the principles underlying each practice (e.g., #5, Connecting Ideas) and included examples of “talk moves” (O’Connor, Michaels, & Chapin, 2015) that teachers could use during discussions (e.g., Which part are you agreeing with? What is the difference between what you are saying and what Quincy said? Table 18.2 Overview of the Argumentation Rating Tool Criterion

Description

Discourse practice

1. DIVERSITY OF PERSPECTIVES

We explore different perspectives together.

2. CLARITY

We are clear in the language and structure of our arguments.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

3. ACCEPTABILITY

We use reasons and evidence that are well examined and accurate. We are logical in the way 10. Articulating reasons we connect our positions, 11. Evaluating inferences reasons, and evidence.

4. LOGICAL VALIDITY

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Centering on contestable questions Sharing responsibilities Discussing alternatives Clarifying meaning Connecting ideas Labelling reasoning processes and parts of an argument 7. Tracking the line of inquiry 8. Evaluating facts 9. Evaluating values

Designing professional development

How does this relate to what William said?). The ART became an important resource for teachers and for us as it helped to sequence and support key instructional activities during professional development and in teachers’ classrooms. Teachers used the ART to 1) review argumentation criteria and practices when planning and evaluating discussions collaboratively and individually; 2) select relevant facilitation strategies when conducting discussions in their classrooms; and 3) engage in evaluation of their progress during coaching sessions and as part of self-reflection. For example, as part of the professional development programme, teachers regularly participated in co-planning a discussion around a particular text. We introduced co-planning during the first two workshops and used it continually throughout the programme (see Table 18.2 for details). During co-planning, teachers began by working with researchers to brainstorm possible “big questions,” which could be used to initiate and sustain inquiry dialogue around a given text. Teachers evaluated the quality of big questions, focusing on the issues of 1) contestability (i.e., it invites multiple interpretations), 2) authenticity (i.e., there is a genuine curiosity about the question), 3) centrality to the issues raised in the text, and 4) clarity (cf. Splitter & Sharp, 1996). Next, teachers planned possible pre-discussion activities, aimed at supporting students’ engagement with the text and enhancing their motivation to discuss it, and post-discussion activities, aimed at having students transfer argumentation skills from the discussion to other contexts, such as when reading and writing arguments. Teachers then participated in a discussion about one of the big question they chose. The discussion was facilitated by a discourse coach, an experienced practitioner from the research team who modelled practices and talk moves described in the ART. Lastly, the group evaluated their own discussion, focusing on selected criteria from the ART. In addition to the two full-day workshops, teachers participated in six two-hour study group meetings and two half-day workshops. These meetings were similar in content and structure throughout the programme. We typically began with reflection, during which teachers discussed their use of inquiry dialogue in a classroom, shared challenges and successes, and addressed instructional issues. During the reflection, we also showed and discussed video clips of facilitation by participating teachers, in which they demonstrated effective use of one of the 11 practices presented in the ART. After the reflection, teachers engaged in co-planning using a new text. In addition to group meetings, teachers took part in individual coaching sessions, during which they viewed and critiqued the videos of their own discussions with the help of a discourse coach. The discourse coach relied on the principles and practices described in a Coaching Protocol (available from the authors), which we developed to support teachers’ ongoing development and reflection. For example, during coaching, the teacher and the discourse coach would each rate the quality of argumentation in a ten-minute video clip using the ART. They then explained the reasoning for their ratings to each other, thus generating opportunities to examine teacher discourse practices in the context of students’ argumentation. Another coaching practice we used was demonstration of inquiry dialogue with students conducted by the discourse coach, followed by a discussion with the teacher. Each teacher participated in six coaching sessions (including one demonstration), lasting about 40 minutes each.

Summary of teacher progress and experiences in Year 3 The ratings of pre- and post-test (de-identified) discussions in Year 3 using the ART revealed similarities across our two sites, with teachers in the experimental condition making an average improvement of more than 1.5 points on the 6-point Likert scale. Independent samples t-tests showed that the post-test differences between experimental and control conditions were statistically significant at the Ohio site (t(10) = 5.33, p < 0.00) and the New Jersey site (t(12) = 5.65, p < 0.00). 261

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Despite considerable changes in teacher practices, the responses to the Reflective Judgment Interview by King and Kitchener (1994) indicated no changes in teachers’ epistemic cognition before and after the professional development, either at the Ohio or New Jersey site, and no differences between experimental and control teachers. Most teachers obtained scores of four and five on the seven-point scale. King and Kitchener (1994) characterize levels 4 and 5 as “quasi-reflective thinking,” which is similar to a multiplist view of knowledge described by Kuhn (1991). These results indicate that teachers’ epistemic cognition remained at a multiplist (relativist) stage throughout the course of the programme, suggesting that teachers continued to view all opinions as equally valid and regard arguments and the use of reasons and evidence as idiosyncratic (i.e., there is no way of evaluating contrasting positions). Our code-based analysis of teachers’ comments revealed several common themes in teachers’ experiences with the professional development. Most frequently, teachers at both sites made comments and asked questions about facilitating inquiry dialogue, their classroom experiences, the texts used with students, argumentation, use of videos, and practical issues. The findings revealed conflicting experiences with professional development, as teachers saw many activities as both helpful and difficult. For example, teachers at both sites valued their classroom experiences implementing discussions, learning about argumentation, and using recommended practices and talk moves to facilitate inquiry dialogue.Teachers also appreciated opportunities to discuss the texts during co-planning and examine the videos of their own discussions and those of their peers. Typical comments were: It’s nice when they [students] start using the terminology that we have.Yesterday, this boy was sitting next to me and all of a sudden someone was saying something and he goes “You’re assuming way too much right now.” And the whole time while he was sitting next to me he was saying things that I usually say. So, I said: “Alright I don’t have to say anything because you’re taking over.” So, that’s good (Focus Group 3, New Jersey). I like when we actually role-play [co-plan] the discussion … because I feel like when we do that, it just gives me more ideas and insights of how I want to discuss it with my kids (Focus Group 2, New Jersey). It [coaching] is individualized. I think that’s what I like the most.You show me something, that a student said this and this, and maybe how I could have responded better. I mean … it’s really helpful (Focus Group 2, Ohio). At the same time, teachers struggled with facilitating inquiry dialogue, choosing texts, learning about argumentation, and various practical issues. I think one of the last discussions we had, I had a really hard time following what their positions were. I kept saying, “So, your position is?” I felt like the whole time I kept having to ask (Coaching, Ohio). For me, one of the biggest things, I mean, with time was, with all of the curriculum that we have to cover, taking time to do, to prep them [students] for discussions and those sorts of things, which doing it every week would have … and I didn’t do a dialogical discussion every week.That would have taken a lot away from my kids (Coaching, Ohio). Our analysis showed a great deal of consistency in teacher comments and reactions across the two sites. Teachers raised similar issues, both positive and negative, concerning their experiences learning to promote inquiry dialogue in their classrooms. 262

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Discussion In this project, we focused specifically on inquiry dialogue, a type of talk aimed at collaboratively finding the most reasonable answer to a contestable question. To support teacher learning to facilitate inquiry dialogue in a classroom, we designed a comprehensive professional development programme, which included curriculum materials, instructional activities, student texts, teacher videos, and assessment tools intended to promote teacher growth.The programme is now published in a practitioner-oriented book, called The Most Reasonable Answer: Helping Students Build Better Arguments Together (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017). Our professional development produced considerable changes in teacher discourse practices, which were consistent across two sites and over three years of trialling the programme (Wilkinson, Reznitskaya, Bourdage et al., 2017; Wilkinson, Reznitskaya, Oyler et al., 2017). These are encouraging results, especially in light of the challenges other researchers have faced trying to modify teachers’ discourse practices (e.g., Alvermann & Hayes, 1989; Osborne, Simon, Christodoulou, Howell-Richardson, & Richardson, 2013; Smith, Hardman,Wall, & Mroz, 2004). Our code-based analysis of teachers’ experiences revealed that the participants found several features of the professional development programme valuable for their learning. We want to especially highlight the use of co-planning to support teachers’ ability to work with controversial issues raised in student texts.We suggest that formulating “big questions” and then discussing them together during co-planning allowed teachers to identify important topics in the texts and develop a deeper understanding of possible arguments that could be constructed in relation to these topics. This may have helped compensate for teacher’s lack of content knowledge on a particular topic or for the absence of a philosophy background, which some scholars believe to be necessary for effective facilitation (e.g., Gardner, 2015). We also found that individual coaching sessions, during which the teacher and the discourse coach examined the quality of students’ arguments using the ART, were highly productive for promoting teachers’ learning of facilitation. During coaching, the teacher and the discourse coach focused first on the quality of arguments in the students’ talk and then considered the opportunities (taken or missed) to use a particular practice from the ART. In other words, the pedagogical “movement” during coaching went from student arguments to teacher moves, allowing teachers to see discourse practices recommended in the ART as strategies to address specific weaknesses in the quality of students’ arguments. Because facilitation practices are contingent on the quality of student arguments, they are best understood when situated in the context of student talk during inquiry dialogue. At the same time, the study of teacher experiences revealed that they struggled with implementing advocated practices and found facilitation of argumentation quite challenging, as it represented a significant departure from their typical practices and placed new intellectual demands on their interactions with students. This brings up important questions about scaling up professional development efforts. In our professional development programme, we aimed to have teachers acquire rather sophisticated knowledge and skills of argumentation, such as identifying warrants and tracking the structure of student arguments during the discussion. Accordingly, our professional development was very resource-intensive; it relied on sustained and, at times, individualized teacher support, which was provided by project members with high levels of expertise in argumentation and facilitation. Yet, it may be that there are other “high leverage practices” that can be readily learned by teachers and yield substantial learning gains (Ball, Sleep, Boerst, & Bass., 2009). At the time of writing, the field lacks research that compares different types of professional development programmes to reveal their relative costs and benefits for teacher learning. 263

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Teacher comments also reflected increasing difficulties stemming from participating in professional development at a time of unprecedented expansion of high-stakes, standardized testing in public schools. Even our most enthusiastic teachers complained about “finding the time” to try out and implement new practices, and they were worried about school administrators and parents who, in the words of one teacher, “breathe down our necks and want us to prepare the kids for the test” (Focus Group 2, New Jersey). Although we were able to work around this challenge, we continue to be concerned about the consequences that the disproportionate focus on high-stakes, standardized testing has on educational research, as well as on teacher learning and practice. Turning now to epistemic cognition, we find it puzzling that the large improvements in teacher discourse practices were not accompanied by corresponding changes in their epistemic cognition. It may be that changing epistemic cognition requires a more explicit and systematic attention during professional development. For example, Khishfe and Abd-El-Khalick (2002) suggested that engagement in inquiry alone may not be sufficient and should be supplemented with direct reflection on the epistemic dimensions of the experience. More research is needed to identify instructional activities that can help teachers to calibrate their discourse practices with epistemic cognition that supports informed and sustained use of these practices (Bråten et al., 2017). In addition, considering recent proposals that epistemic cognition is highly situated (e.g., Chinn, Buckland, & Samarapungavan, 2011), it is possible that the measure developed by King and Kitchener (1994) was not sensitive to shifts in teachers’ thinking. Several recent studies have suggested new ways of measuring epistemic cognition, including think-aloud methodology and measures of enacted epistemology to reveal more nuanced and rich conceptions of knowledge and knowing (Mason, 2016; Olafson & Schraw, 2010;Yadav, Herron, & Samarapungavan, 2011). Measures that are directly connected to teacher facilitation of inquiry dialogue in a classroom may be more likely to capture important changes in epistemic cognition resulting from participating in professional development. In concluding, we would like to recommend that educators who are interested in designing professional development consider the merits of examining the programme at more than one site at the initial stages. Working with multiple groups of teachers and multiple facilitators, in different contexts, has the potential to yield a more robust programme, as we were able to identify what was common across sites and what was unique to a particular site. As Hill, Beisiegel, and Jacob (2013) suggest, “initial work must [also] progress with multiple groups of teachers and multiple facilitators, lest idiosyncratic results at one location lead developers to incorrect conclusions about programme design and promise” (pp. 476–477). Moreover, to be responsive to the needs of teachers at our two sites, and to capitalize on the opportunity to test different approaches, we found it helpful to build variation into delivery of the professional development at each site in the initial stages of programme development. In Years 1 and 2 of the project, we maintained common goals and used the same or similar readings and activities but were able to vary the sequence or nature of the activities teachers experienced. As a result, we were able to explore the relative benefits of the different design approaches and use this information to inform programme revisions for the final year of the project.

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19 ATTITUDES TOWARDS DIALOGIC TEACHING AND THE CHOICE TO TEACH The role of preservice teachers’ perceptions on their own school experience Alexander Gröschner, Miriam F. Jähne and Susi Klaß

Introduction Dialogic teaching is broadly considered a communicative interaction among all participants in a teaching situation (Burbules, 1993). According to Alexander (2005; 2018), dialogic teaching is based on the power of talk to foster students’ thinking and learning. As research on dialogic teaching in teacher education and professional development has shown, attitudes and beliefs are crucial prerequisites that influence teaching practice. Thus, teachers’ beliefs are cultivated by experiences and perceptions of teaching during their own school lives (Dewey, 1904). To develop and continuously improve teachers’ own teaching identities, it is important for teachers to be aware of their beliefs and reflect upon their teaching (Schön, 1983). Studies like ‘Accountable Talk’ (Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008; O’Connor, Michaels, Chapin, & Harbaugh, 2017), ‘CamTalk’ (Higham, Brindley, & van de Pol, 2014), and the ‘Dialogic Video Cycle’ (Gröschner, Seidel, Kiemer, & Pehmer, 2015) focus on classroomrelated interventions and support teachers by offering pedagogical content (e.g., ‘talk formats’ and ‘talk moves’; Michaels & O’Connor, 2012) with the potential to change everyday teaching (Wilkinson, Reznitskaya, Bourdage, & Nelson, 2017). Changing classroom discourse practice appears challenging, as verbal teacher–student interactions are highly routinised through instructional patterns and ‘choreographies of teaching’ (Oser & Baeryswil, 2001). Therefore, it is argued that teachers’ (instructional) beliefs influence teacher–student interactions (Mameli & Molinari, 2017) and that research should already consider preservice teachers’ attitudes toward productive communication. Although previous studies have found it difficult to change teachers’ beliefs concerning dialogic education in professional development (Gröschner, Klaß, & Dehne, 2018; Wilkinson et al., 2017), less is known about preservice teachers’ attitudes toward dialogic teaching and their experiences prior to entering a teacher education programme. This chapter aims to contribute new knowledge to this field of research by presenting a study addressing the second aspect of this question. 269

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Research on professional growth and competency development in the teaching profession emphasises the role of practical learning opportunities to experience and analyse classroom interactions in preservice teacher education (Blömeke, Gustafsson, & Shavelson, 2015; Kunter et al., 2011). Furthermore, learning-to-teach studies show the influence of motivation and (own) beliefs about teaching on preservice teachers’ learning outcomes (Kagan, 1992; Vermunt & Endedijk, 2011;Vermunt & Donche, 2017). So far, only a few studies address preservice teachers’ previous school experiences and beliefs about teaching and learning (Balli, 2011; Markic & Eilks, 2007). To our knowledge, no study has yet investigated the pre-experiences of preservice teachers in the field of dialogic teaching. Furthermore, attitudes and beliefs—that is, teachers’ epistemological beliefs about teaching in general—have been measured primarily by qualitative studies (e.g., Johnston, Woodside-Jiron, & Day, 2001) or quantitative studies focusing on (general) interactive practices (e.g., Mameli & Molinari, 2017). For this reason, the overall aim of the present study is to develop a measure to capture attitudes toward dialogic teaching by considering the qualitative (e.g., student reasoning or quality of teacher feedback) and quantitative (number of students engaged in classroom discourse) aspects of purposeful teacher–student interactions (Walshaw & Anthony, 2008). It is assumed that dialogic teaching, as a teacher’s pedagogical ‘repertoire’ (Alexander, 2018), takes responsibility for adaptively engaging each student more (often) and qualitatively scaffolding student learning (for the class as a whole) using specific ‘talk moves’ and ‘talk formats’ (Michaels & O’Connor, 2012). This study explored how preservice teachers perceived their school teachers’ dialogic teaching in retrospect. To contribute to preservice teachers’ decisions to become teachers, we further investigated the relation between this retrospective perspective and the motivation to pursue a teaching career (Watt & Richardson, 2007;Watt & Richardson, 2008).The motivation to choose a teaching career as a non-cognitive dimension of professional competence provides further information regarding teacher professionalisation (Klassen & Kim, 2017; Kunter et al., 2011).

Research on beliefs and attitudes toward dialogic teaching Epistemological beliefs are beliefs and views concerning the general nature of knowledge (Perry, 1970) related to instructional behaviour (Klassen & Kim, 2017; Pajares, 1992). Pajares (1992) suggested that educational beliefs are formed early and play a crucial role in knowledge interpretation (Erens, 2017). Due to their relation to other belief systems, they are frequently characterised as attitudes and values that guide human behaviour (Rokeach, 1968). Though they are often used synonymously, in the context of dialogic teaching, we prefer to use the term ‘attitudes’ instead of ‘beliefs’ to emphasise that dialogic teaching is a subcategory of an educational belief system of instructional practice focusing on a specific quality of ‘acting’ (Pajares, 1992, p. 314). Concerning instructional behaviour, two kinds of instruction exist on two poles of a continuum ranging from transmissive (teacher-centred) to constructive (student-centred) beliefs (Brauer & Wilde, 2013; Kohonen, 1992). Transmission beliefs imply the presentation of knowledge by an active teacher to a more passive student: that is, a teacher’s transmission of knowledge that students receive and master. In classroom talk, teachers tend toward monologic discourse (or more ‘monologic voices’; Wegerif, 2011) and a teacher-led Initiation–Response–Evaluation (IRE) pattern (Jurik, Gröschner, & Seidel, 2013; Mehan, 1979). Constructive teacher beliefs about teaching imply that students participate actively, construct and elaborate their knowledge (Richardson, 2003), and are actively engaged in student-centred teaching practices (Mameli & Molinari, 2017; Windschitl, 2002). Mameli and Molinari (2017) investigated preservice teachers’ attitudes regarding interactive teaching practices in the classroom by identifying three groups: ‘student-centred practices focused 270

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on flexibility’, ‘student-centred practices focused on participation’, and ‘teacher-centred practices’ (Mameli & Molinari, 2017, p. 225).The preservice teachers in their study reported higher studentcentred (constructivist) attitudes than teacher-centred attitudes. Thus, experiences (mostly related to own schooling) play a crucial role in the development of attitudes concerning teaching during teacher education (Geddis & Roberts, 1998; Levin, 2015). In general, dialogic teaching is different from interactive teaching. As Alexander (2018) noted, dialogic teaching is not about one right way to maximise talk’s quality and power; instead, it is more a repertoire of talk-based pedagogical skills and strategies teachers use to ‘expand and refine the talk repertoires and capacities of their students’ (Alexander, 2018, p. 3). Teaching in a more dialogic way implies a ‘shift from telling students what to think to helping them advance their thinking’ (Wilkinson et al., 2017, p. 2). Taking sociocultural theory into account (Vygotsky, 1978), Alexander (2018) argued that dialogic teaching means that both the teacher and the students are responsible for the ‘deployment’ (p. 3) of the repertoire. Beyond this qualitative aspect of how to talk and initiate productive classroom dialogue and interaction (Howe & Abedin, 2013), Walshaw and Anthony (2008) emphasised that students engage more actively, as a first activity, and that teachers (then) scaffold student thinking and learning, as a second activity. Research in teacher professional development has shown that these activities are closely related (Kiemer, Gröschner, Pehmer, & Seidel, 2015). Recently, Sedlacek and Sedova (2017) found that the number of students who were verbally engaged in classroom discourse was correlated with the quality of elaborated student talk. Thus, from our perspective, dialogic teaching, as a well-established paradigm in research on dialogic pedagogy (Lefstein & Snell, 2014), involves teachers in actions to: (1) foster verbal student engagement in the classroom and (2) support student reasoning in an adaptive way. From this point of view, teachers focusing on dialogic teaching, for example, encourage students to verbally engage, link student responses to one another, elaborate student ideas, and scaffold student thinking and learning (Mercer, 2008; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Vrikki et al., 2018). With regard to attitudes toward dialogic teaching, it is assumed that teachers with a constructivist perspective focus more on both activities (engage students verbally, scaffold student learning) than teachers with a transmissive perspective on teaching and learning (Bakhtin, 1981), who are less willing to invite students to participate equally or support individual students’ learning. As Dewey (1904) noted, teachers’ educational beliefs about teaching and learning originate in their own school lives. Thus, reflecting on own school experiences and perceived teaching is an important aspect of (early) teacher training (Gröschner, 2019). Thus far, perceptions and experiences of dialogic teaching as an (curriculum) element of preservice teacher education have been rarely considered in research. So far, studies have mainly focused on productive interaction in the classroom (Gillies, 2014; Howe & Abedin, 2013; Mercer & Dawes, 2014; Walshaw & Anthony, 2008). Therefore, the present study investigates preservice teachers’ perceptions of experienced (dialogic) teaching as a precursor for (dialogic) teaching attitudes.

School experiences and the motivation to become a teacher Preservice teachers enter university with strong backgrounds in school experience and classroom-related teacher–student interaction. So far, research has shown that teachers’ own school biographies influence their attitudes toward teaching (Balli, 2011; Haught, Nardi, & Walls, 2015; Richardson, 1996). A study on science education found that science teaching in school is often based on teachers’ experiences during their own school careers (Markic & Eilks, 2007). The ways in which teachers learn science themselves is frequently related to their beliefs concerning how students should learn science (Brauer & Wilde, 2013). Thus, an experience of student271

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centred teaching practice will strongly affect a teacher’s own practice. Although there is no empirical evidence regarding the influences of teacher attitudes on (dialogic) teaching based on their own school experiences, research on the role of teaching practice during a practicum shows that preservice teachers often imitate what they observe from mentor teachers in the classroom (Lawson, Çakmak, Gündüz, & Busher, 2015).Thus, it is valuable to explore preservice teachers’ attitudes toward dialogic teaching both retrospectively and during teacher education (Gröschner, Klaß, & Dehne, 2018). School experiences also influence teachers’ motivation to choose a teaching career (Wyrwal & Zinn, 2018). Positive memories and the intention to perform as well as or better than their own school teachers (e.g., in classroom management), among other factors, are important in the decision to become a teacher (Balli, 2011; Bergmark, Lundström, Manderstedt, & Palo, 2018; Haughtet al., 2015; Manuel & Hughes, 2006).Watt and colleagues (2012, p. 804) stated: ‘Because almost every individual has been a student, effective (and ineffective) teachers can provide powerful role models, as well as the opportunity for vicarious personal judgements concerning one’s own teaching-related abilities’. Over the last decade, their FIT-Choice scale (Watt & Richardson, 2007; Watt et al., 2012) has been used in numerous studies to assess teachers’ motivations for choosing teaching as a career. The scale was developed based on expectancy-value motivational theory (Eccles, 2005), and research has shown that intrinsic value, social utility value, and perceived teaching ability are the highest-rated factors influencing the choice of a teaching career (Watt & Richardson, 2007; Watt et al., 2012). However, prior research on motivations for the choice to teach has not considered attitudes toward or perceptions of dialogic teaching. The present study addresses this research gap and examines the relation between perceptions of ­dialogic teaching and the choice to enter a teacher education programme.

The present study Considering the role of purposeful classroom discourse for student learning (Walshaw & Anthony, 2008), the present study explores how to promote dialogic teaching in preservice teacher education. As a first approach, it was assumed that perceptions of dialogic teaching influence learning to teach and the motivation to choose a teaching career. Preservice teachers enter university with a ‘schoolbag’ full of experiences of teacher–student interaction; however, research has rarely addressed the transition from school to university in this context. Therefore, we explored how preservice teachers perceived their school teachers’ practice as dialogic teaching and investigated how this retrospective perspective was related to their career choice motivations. Due to the lack of quantitative measures in this area, we developed an instrument (the ‘Attitudes towards Dialogic Teaching-Scale’, or ADT-S), which we introduce in this chapter. Furthermore, we adapted the instrument to capture preservice teachers’ perceptions of their own school experiences. We addressed the following research questions: 1. What is the construct validity of the ADT-S? 2. How do preservice teachers perceive their school teachers’ dialogic teaching? Are there differences between first- and second-year preservice teachers? 3. How are preservice teachers’ perceptions of their school teachers’ dialogic teaching related to their own motivations to become teachers? What role do their past school teachers and subject choice(s) play? 4. Do preservice teachers differ regarding school teachers’ perceived positive, negative, or ambivalent teaching practice? How are these memories classified as profiles related to preservice teachers’ motivations to choose a teaching career? 272

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Method Sample In total, our study included N = 428 preservice teachers (53.3% female, Mage = 20.10, SDage = 1.23) in their first and second academic years at a German university. We chose this sample to ensure that the preservice teachers had no practical experience teaching a class in school. Preservice teachers in secondary education (higher and lower track) decide on two school subjects when they enter the teacher education programme, often selecting a first choice for their first subject. For this first subject, 43.5% of the participants studied a language, 23.4% studied natural sciences or mathematics, 14.0% studied social sciences, and 19.1% studied other subjects. The participants studied these subjects primarily in their second or third semester (Msemester = 2.52, SDsemester = 0.64). A subsample of n = 254 participants (50.4% female, Mage = 20.22, SDage = 1.19) represented the training sample, and a second subsample of n = 174 participants (56.9% female, Mage = 19.94, SDage = 1.29) represented the test sample for construct validation of the ADT-S instrument.

Research design The data collection took place as part of the experimental study ‘Online-based video feedback in pre-service teachers’ teaching practicum—An intervention study’ (OVID-PRAX). Data for the training sample were gathered from an introductory lecture in Educational Science during the 2017/2018 winter term, and two further introductory lectures in Educational Science in the 2018 summer term provided the data for the test sample.

Instruments Attitudes toward dialogic teaching. To capture attitudes (in this study, preservice teachers’ perceptions) in the field of teacher education, the ADT-S was developed by considering different sources mentioned in previous research. According to our assumptions (Section “Research on beliefs and attitudes toward dialogic teaching”) concerning the activities related to attitudes toward dialogic teaching, we aimed to capture activities that (1) foster student engagement and (2) scaffold student learning. For (1), we adapted Mameli and Molinari’s (2017) self-report scale on teaching interactive practices. For (2), we developed items based on previous studies (Alexander, 2005; Gröschner et al., 2018; Michaels & O’Connor, 2012; Mercer & Dawes, 2014; Walshaw & Anthony, 2008). Following factor analyses to reduce the number of items and test for dimensionality, the ADT-S yielded two subscales comprising a total of 14 items. The dialogic teaching (ten items) subscale focuses on how preservice teachers experience the quality of the teacher’s repertoire with respect to learning atmosphere and scaffolding learning. The student engagement (four items) subscale focuses on the preservice teachers’ memories of the number (quantity) of pupils they engaged during lessons and the number of different pupils involved in class conversations. All items were rated on a five-point Likert scale. Over the total data set (test and training sample), the Cronbach’s alphas (Cronbach, 1951) for dialogic teaching and student engagement were α = 0.86 and α = 0.85, respectively. To test for convergent validity, we used two subscales of an established instrument for capturing classroom management skills (Thiel, Ophardt, & Piwowar, 2013). The working bond (five items, α = 0.70) subscale addresses the perceived teacher–pupil relationship in class.The items in this subscale capture the characteristics of an empathic, supportive, and academically challenging relationship and were expected to correlate with dialogic teaching. The group mobilisation (four items, α = 0.86) subscale examines pupils’ involvement and participation in class.The items cap273

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ture the characteristics of a classroom in which a teacher maximises the number of students who are actively involved and were expected to correlate with student engagement. Items are assessed on a six-point rating scale. Career choice motivation. Career choice motivation was assessed using the subscales (34 items) of the German translation of the FIT-Choice scale (König et al., 2013). The subscales address 11 factors relevant to career choice: namely, perceived teaching qualification (3 items, α = 0.82), make-shift solution (3 items, α = 0.68), occupational safety (3 items, α = 0.91), work–life balance (5 items, α = 0.85), shaping children’s futures (2 items, α = 0.82), lifting social disadvantage (2 items, α = 0.81), social contribution to society (3 items, α = 0.79), working with children and adolescents (4 items, α = 0.89), own learning experiences (3 items, α = 0.85), social influence (3 items, α = 0.89), and subject-specific motivation (3 items, α = 0.82). Items are measured on a seven-point rating scale with the poles ‘not important at all’ and ‘very important’.The influences of the one remembered school teacher in ADT-S on career and subject choice were assessed via two single items (‘This teacher influenced my career choice’ and ‘This teacher influenced my subject choice’) on a six-point rating scale. Qualitative profile analysis. To capture the retrospective characterisation of the remembered school teacher’s teaching, participants were asked to write up to four exemplary adjectives or short descriptions. Two independent raters categorised the N = 1,658 characteristics as ‘positive’, ‘ambivalent’ (positive and negative aspects), or ‘negative’, thereby creating ‘profiles’ for each remembered teacher. These ‘profiles’ could be matched to n = 422 preservice teachers. The interrater reliability of the initial assignment was ICC > 0.91 (Krippendorff, 2004), and the interrater reliability after a second training was ICC > 0.99.

Data analysis Analyses were performed using IBM SPSS Statistics and R 3.4.1 (R Development Core Team, 2017). To extract the number of factors and reduce the number of items, we used the R package nFactors (Raîche & Magis, 2010). Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were conducted with lavaan (Rosseel, 2012). To indicate an acceptable model fit, RMSEA values up to 0.08, CFI and TLI values greater than 0.90, and SRMR values less than 0.08 were expected (Jackson, Gillapsy, & Purc-Stephenson, 2009). The Chi-squared statistics, which are affected by sample size, are reported but were not considered for model selection. As the normality assumption in large samples (n > 200) tends to be violated in tests for univariate normality, even with small deviations, the normality distribution was visually and descriptively checked (Field, 2009), and the Q–Q plots and histograms showed mild to moderate deviations from normality. As skewness was in the range of ±2 and kurtosis was in the range of ±7, the CFA was considered safe to conduct (Curran, West, & Finch, 1996). In particular, maximum likelihood statistics proved quite robust to mild violations of normality (Jackson et al., 2009). The product–moment correlation was used as a correlation coefficient and proved robust against violations of normality (e.g., Fowler, 1987; Havlicek & Peterson, 1977). Group comparisons were conducted via the Kruskal–Wallis test (Kruskal & Wallis, 1952) and the Mann–Whitney U-Test (Mann & Whitney, 1947). Effect sizes were calculated using Tomczak and Tomczak’s (2014) recommendations.

Results Construct validation of the ADT-S measure Regarding the first research question, we tested the construct validity using factor analyses (EFA and CFA) and correlations with external criteria (convergent validity). To examine the structure and 274

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reduce the number of items, an EFA was run on the test sample with a 6:1 subject-to-variable ratio (Streiner, 1994). To examine the number of factors, the parallel analysis (Horn, 1965) and optimal coordinates, a non-graphical solution to the scree-test (Raîche, Walls, Magis, Riopel, & Blais, 2013) was applied. Both the parallel analysis and optimal coordinates revealed a two-factor solution. The factor loadings were examined using orthogonal rotation (varimax).To select only meaningful variables and significantly reduce the number of items, only items with factor loadings of h² > 0.50 (Floyd & Widaman, 1995) and without cross-factor loadings were included for the subsequent confirmatory analyses.The orthogonal factor loadings of 14 items are presented in Table 19.1. To evaluate the factor structure derived by the EFA, CFA analyses of the training sample were carried out with a subject-to-variable ratio of 10:1 (Jöreskog & Sörbom, 1989). Correlations were allowed among factors but not residuals. The model showed an acceptable model fit with items strongly related to the factors (R² > 0.25) and the following model fit indices: RMSEA = 0.06, CFI = 0.94, TLI = 0.92, SRMR = 0.07, χ²(76) = 120.19, p < 0.01. The factors correlated about r(172) = 0.38, p < 0.01. Further, the subscales provided satisfying reliabilities, with Cronbach’s alphas of α = 0.87 for dialogic teaching and α = 0.86 for student engagement. The two negatively formulated items of the student engagement factor were inverted for the following procedures.The correlation between dialogic teaching and working bond was significant in a two-tailed test, with r(172) = 0.71, p < 0.01, as was the correlation between student engagement and group mobilisation, with r(172) = 0.56, p < 0.01.

Preservice teachers’ perceptions of their school teachers’ dialogic teaching Regarding the second research question, we investigated the extent of preservice teachers’ perceptions of dialogic teaching and student engagement and tested for differences between first- and second-year preservice teachers. The Mann–Whitney U-Test showed no difference between first- and second-year students in dialogic teaching (z = 1.14, p = 0.26) or student engagement (z = 1.49, p = 0.14); therefore, we report overall scores on the subscales: the mean scores for dialogic teaching was M = 3.65 (SD = 0.70, Min = 1.30, Max = 5.00), and the mean score for student engagement was M = 3.02 (SD = 0.90, Min = 1.00, Max = 5.00). Regarding the third research question, we explored the relation between the subscales of the (adapted) ADT-S and preservice teachers’ career choice motivations, considering the role of their past school teacher on their career and subject choice. The correlation between perceived dialogic teaching and student engagement declined slightly when controlling for possible explanatory variables (r ≥ 0.33, p < 0.01). The correlations between dialogic teaching and perceived teaching qualification, occupational safety, shaping children’s futures, lifting social disadvantages, social contribution to society, work with children and adolescents, and subject-specific motivation were significant (r ≥ 0.14, p < 0.01). The statistically significant relationships remained but were slightly lower when controlling for the possible explanatory variables (r ≥ 0.10, p < 0.05 – p < 0.01).The significant correlations between dialogic teaching and work–life balance and own learning experiences disappeared when controlling for the influence of the school teacher on career and subject choice. Regarding the second subscale, the correlation between student engagement and work with children and adolescents (r = 0.16, p < 0.01) dropped slightly when controlling for the influence of the school teacher on career and subject choice (r ≥ 0.12, p < 0.05 – p < 0.01). The significant correlations between student engagement and perceived teaching qualification and subject-specific motivation (r = 0.10, p < 0.05) disappeared after controlling for the explanatory variables. Overall, the influence of the school teacher on career choice appeared to be a more prominent explanatory variable than the influence of the school teacher on subject choice in all cases. Table 19.2 shows both the partial correlation coefficients, 275

Dialogic teaching This teacher… took time for feedback to individual pupils often praised pupils followed up on pupils’ responses to take up their ideas appreciated pupils‘ own ideas encouraged pupils to share and build on others’ ideas posed open questions gave pupils’ assistance to respond to questions gave pupils advice on how to learn better made explicit what pupils can do to reach a specific learning goal explicitly told pupils not to be afraid of saying something wrong

Items: abbreviated and translated item content

–0.61 –0.63 –0.68

–0.31 –0.54 –0.49 –0.49 –0.59 –0.61

–1.05

3.61 (1.04)

3.60 (1.06) 3.58 (1.05)

3.64 (1.07) 3.60 (1.16)

3.66 (1.01) 3.60 (1.00)

3.57 (1.06)

3.66 (1.04)

4.00 (1.17)

0.15

–0.20

–0.10

–0.25 –0.14

–0.53 –0.57

–0.15 0.04

–0.05

80.00

73.20

71.40

73.20 72.00

72.80 72.00

72.00 71.60

72.20

0.54

0.58

0.60

0.54 0.62

0.54 0.66

0.61 0.53

0.62

Item difficulty p Dialogic teaching

Student engagement

Kurtosis

M (SD)

Skewness

Factor loadings for EFA (final 14 items)

Item parameters

Table 19.1 Descriptive statistics and factor loadings of the final EFA- and CFA-models of the ADT-S

0.38

0.40

0.39

0.32 0.39

0.29 0.47

0.38 0.30

0.39

h²

0.74 (0.55)

0.60 (0.36)

0.72 (0.52)

0.52 (0.27) 0.71 (0.51)

0.60 (0.36) 0.55 (0.30)

0.67 (0.44) 0.61 (0.37)

0.65 (0.42)

Dialogic Student engagement teaching λ (R²) λ (R²)

Factor loadings for CFA (modified model)

Student engagement This teacher… interacted with mostly the same pupils (-) interacted only with a few pupils (-) In this teacher’s lessons… mostly the same pupils participated (-) only a few pupils contributed verbally (-) –0.09 –0.20

0.10 –0.20

3.01 (1.07)

3.17 (1.11)

2.75 (1.04)

3.16 (1.10)

–0.70

–0.58

–0.77

–0.59

63.20

55.00

63.40

60.20

0.79

0.59

0.70

0.65

0.66

0.38

0.54

0.47

0.76 (0.57)

0.67 (0.45)

0.86 (0.74)

0.83 (0.68)

5.62 (0.89) 2.24 (1.38) 5.29 (1.34) 4.15 (1.37) 6.06 (0.98) 5.64 (1.24) 5.60 (1.11) 5.85 (1.11) 5.45 (1.39) 4.49 (1.74) 6.22 (0.85)

Career choice motivation Perceived teaching qualification Make-shift solution Occupational safety Work–life balance Shaping children’s future Lift social disadvantages Social contribution to society Work with children/adolescents Own learning experiences Social influence Subject-specific motivation 0.12* 0.09 0.11* 0.08 0.12** 0.19** 0.12* 0.12* 0.07 –0.02 0.13*

1 0.33** 0.14** 0.08 0.13* 0.09 0.16** 0.22** 0.14** 0.15** 0.12* 0.00 0.14**

1 0.35**

0.10* –0.07 0.00 0.02 0.07 0.07 0.04 0.14** 0.04 –0.02 0.10**

0.38** 1

r

0.07 –0.05 –0.02 0.01 0.04 0.05 0.03 0.12* 0.00 –0.02 0.07

0.33** 1

0.08 –0.06 –0.02 0.01 0.05 0.06 0.04 0.13** 0.02 –0.02 0.08

0.35** 1

r (influence on r (influence on career subject choice choice partialed out) partialed out)

Student engagement

Note:  Influence on career choice = influence of the school teacher on career choice. Influence on subject choice = influence of school teacher on subject choice.

0.17** 0.07 0.14** 0.10** 0.19** 0.23** 0.14** 0.16** 0.17** 0.01 0.19**

3.65 (0.70) 1 3.02 (0.90) 0.38**

ADT-S Dialogic teaching Student engagement

r

M (SD)

Scale

r (influence on r (influence on career subject choice choice partialed out) partialed out)

Dialogic teaching

Table 19.2 Zero-order and partial correlations of the ADT-S subscales and career choice motivation, with influence of the school teacher on career/subject choice as explanatory variables

Attitudes towards dialogic teaching

which control for the influence of school teacher on career and subject choice as explanatory variables, and the correlation coefficients between the ADT-S and the items describing career choice motivation.

Qualitative profiles regarding school teachers’ teaching practice Regarding research question four, qualitative data were gathered to describe the (dialogic) teaching practice in more detail. For this question, preservice teachers were asked to write down the characteristics of their school teachers’ practice. To analyse the data, the short characteristic descriptions (in total 1,658 adjectives) were classified as ‘positive’, ‘negative’, or ‘ambivalent’ teaching profiles. Altogether, the three assumed profiles of school teachers could be identified across the full data set and be matched to n = 422 preservice teachers.The profiles were compared with respect to perceived dialogic teaching, student engagement, and preservice teachers’ career choice motivation. Non-parametric group comparisons showed significant differences in dialogic teaching among the teaching practice profiles (H = 57.19, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.13). Post-hoc comparisons revealed that preservice teachers who reported positive teaching profiles (n = 269) scored significantly higher than preservice teachers who had ambivalent (n = 143, z = 6.66, p < 0.01) and negative (n = 10, z = 4.30, p < 0.01) memories of their school teachers’ teaching. Preservice teachers who reported ambivalent and negative characteristics did not differ (z = –2.13, p = 0.10). For student engagement, significant differences among the profiles (H = 22.02, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.05) were reflected in significantly higher scores among the preservice teachers who reported positive teaching practices than among those who reported ambivalent (z = 3.84, p < 0.01) or negative (z = 3.11, p < 0.01) teaching practices. Preservice teachers who reported ambivalent and negative characteristics did not differ (z = –1.84, p = 0.20). Furthermore, non-parametric group comparisons showed significant differences in selected facets of career choice motivation: namely, makeshift solutions (H = 8.95, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.02) and own learning experience (H = 10.32, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.02). The preservice teachers who reported positive teaching profiles received significantly higher scores on makeshift solutions than those who reported ambivalent memories of teaching practice (z = 2.55, p < 0.05), whereas preservice teachers with positive and negative reports (z = 1.84, p = 0.20) and preservice teachers who reported ambivalent and negative memories (z = –0.99, p = 0.96) did not differ. Preservice teachers with positive (z = 3.21, p < 0.01) and ambivalent (z = –3.10, p < 0.01) characterisations scored significantly higher on own learning experience than preservice teachers who reported negative characteristics, whereas preservice teachers with positive and ambivalent reported teaching practices did not differ (z = 0.19, p = 1.00). The influence of the school teacher on career choice (H = 12.92, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.03) was significantly higher for preservice teachers who described their teachers positively than for those who described ambivalent (z = 2.73, p < 0.05) or negative (z = 2.63, p < 0.05) memories of their school teachers’ teaching practice, whereas the preservice teachers with ambivalent and negative characterisations did not differ (z = –1.72, p = 0.26). Furthermore, the influence of the school teacher on subject choice (H = 18.44, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.04) was significantly higher for the group of preservice teachers with positive memories than for the groups with ambivalent (z = 3.80, p < 0.01) and negative (z = 2.42, p < 0.05) characterisations, whereas preservice teachers with ambivalent and negative memories did not differ (z = –1.18, p = 0.71). For all other variables, no differences among the three teaching practice profiles were found. Descriptive values and statistics from the group comparisons are presented in Table 19.3. 279

4.67 (1.23) 4.93 (1.29)

Influence school teacher on career choice Career choice Subject choice

Note:  ** p < 0.01.

5.65 (0.84) 2.36 (1.42) 5.35 (1.30) 4.21 (1.32) 6.09 (1.00) 5.68 (1.25) 5.62 (1.16) 5.87 (1.17) 5.51 (1.32) 4.49 (1.76) 6.22 (0.89)

Career choice motivation Perceived teaching qualification Make-shift solution Occupational safety Work–life balance Shaping children’s future Lift social disadvantages Social contribution to society Work with children and adolescents Own learning experiences Social influence Subject-specific motivation

4.16 (1.63) 4.21 (1.77)

5.56 (0.99) 2.01 (1.27) 5.22 (1.43) 4.09 (1.48) 6.02 (0.95) 5.58 (1.21) 5.53 (1.05) 5.85 (1.01) 5.45 (1.39) 4.47 (1.76) 6.27 (0.75)

3.35 (0.74) 2.80 (0.97)

M (SD)

M (SD)

3.86 (0.57) 3.18 (0.81)

ambivalent

Positive

Profile

ADT-S Dialogic teaching Student engagement

Scale

2.90 (2.13) 3.40 (2.17)

5.87 (0.65) 1.70 (1.16) 5.07 (1.47) 3.60 (1.35) 6.15 (0.97) 5.00 (1.60) 5.63 (0.78) 5.75 (0.69) 3.47 (2.00) 4.38 (1.59) 5.63 (1.06)

2.64 (0.86) 2.15 (1.06)

M (SD)

Negative

Table 19.3 Descriptive statistics and results of nonparametric group-comparisons for the school teacher profiles

417 420

419 416 417 417 416 416 416 415 414 413 414

422 422

n

Group comparisons

12.92** 18.44**

1.06 8.95** 0.75 2.54 1.32 3.03 1.57 2.45 10.32** 0.12 4.40

57.19** 22.02**

H

Attitudes towards dialogic teaching

Discussion The overall aim of this project was to investigate the role of attitudes toward dialogic teaching in preservice teacher education. Following a retrospective perspective, we aimed to explore how preservice teachers in their first two academic years perceived their school teachers’ behaviours in dialogic teaching.We also examined the relation between these remembered experiences and the preservice teachers’ motivations to choose a teaching career, as well as the influence of the remembered school teacher on career and subject choice. To address our research questions, we developed an instrument (based on a standardised measure) that captured student engagement and dialogic teaching as an interrelated ‘repertoire’ (Alexander, 2018) of dialogic teaching based on previous research in the field of dialogic pedagogy (Alexander, 2005; Gröschner et al., 2015; Lefstein & Snell, 2014; Mercer & Dawes, 2014; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Michaels & O’Connor, 2012; Pehmer, Gröschner, & Seidel, 2015). Both subscales received reliable values, and the model fit of the final 14 items of the adapted ADT-S was good. Concerning convergent validity, both subscales showed significant medium correlations with the classroom management sub-scales (Thiel et al., 2013), confirming our assumptions. Following previous research showing the relevance of attitudes in interactive teaching practices (Mameli & Molinari, 2017) and the role of beliefs (in general) in teacher education and professional development (Blömeke et al., 2015; Kunter et al., 2011; Pajares, 1992), the study presented in this chapter showed that, overall, preservice teachers perceive their school teachers’ dialogic teaching rather highly. The preservice teachers in this study especially remembered school teachers who practiced in a more dialogic way (based on the aspects captured in the questionnaire). This finding is in line with previous research showing that preservice teachers often remember positive examples of past teachers (Haught et al., 2015). Furthermore, no statistically significant difference was found between preservice teachers in their first and second academic years of teacher training. Thus, perceptions of past teachers’ dialogic teaching are independent of preservice teachers’ first professional learning-to-teach experiences in academic life (Klassen & Kim, 2017;Vermunt & Endedijk, 2011). With regard to the relation between dialogic teaching and career choice motivation, we found stronger significant correlations between perceived dialogic teaching and career choice motivation (medium effect) than between perceived student engagement and career choice motivation. Intrinsic and social utility values received the highest scores. Furthermore, subject-specific motivation was important. These findings confirm previous results both in general (Watt & Richardson, 2007) and in the context of German samples (König & Rothland, 2012; Watt et al., 2012). It can be stated that, though the sample in the present study consisted mainly of preservice teachers on the secondary level, perceptions of dialogic teaching (in retrospect) are related to the motivation to choose a teaching career. As a consequence, it can be said that positive memories are important and that school teachers are role models for prospective teachers (Balli, 2011; Pajares, 1992) in the context of purposeful teacher–student interaction and a ‘dynamic interactionist view’ (Klassen & Kim, 2017, p. 8). This finding was confirmed by the qualitative characteristics analysed as ‘profiles’ when preservice teachers were asked to describe their past teachers. A positive profile had particular influence on subject and career choice. The effect sizes on the ADT-S can be described as medium (for dialogic teaching) and small (for student engagement). Regarding the second factor of the ADT-S, it was found that only the motivation to work with children/adolescents was related to the more quantitative aspect of student engagement. Thus, the extent of engagement (in terms of the number of students engaged verbally) was less 281

Gröschner, Jähne, and Klaß

important than the quality of engagement (Sedlacek & Sedova, 2017). This finding could also be interpreted by considering the professional role of teachers, whose professional task is—from a preservice teacher’s perspective—to engage equally with (more) pupils (Alexander, 2018; Jurik et al., 2013; Mameli & Molinari, 2017). Preservice teachers without practical field experience also tend to follow a student-centred perspective that focuses on student-oriented talk formats and moves (Gröschner et al., 2018). The highest correlations were found for the social aspects related to the role of the selected past teachers and subject choices in the preservice teachers’ career choices. Thus, it seems that what Wegerif (2011, p. 188) called a ‘socio-cultural identification’ is relevant for developing dialogism during teacher training.

Limitations and future research The reported study has some limitations.While the ADT-scale development has been successful in the context of the retrospective perception level, the dialogic teaching subscale comprises different aspects of the professional teacher ‘repertoire’ derived from previous research in the field of dialogic education. Therefore, further items should be included to capture more of teachers’ single activities concerning purposeful discourse. Moreover, it remains open how attitudes toward dialogic teaching are linked to components of teaching and learning that are emphasised in educational effectiveness research (Seidel & Shavelson, 2007). Across all items, we used trainings and a test sample to develop the ADT-S as an ecological instrument that should be tested in future research. To investigate the development of attitudes toward dialogic teaching in practice, as well as to predict knowledge on dialogic education, we are currently running an experimental study with 150 preservice teachers in which we examine attitudes through pre-, mid-, and post-tests during a five-month teaching practicum. For this study, the ADT-S instructions were changed to a practice-related format. The study aims to examine preservice teachers’ attitudes toward dialogic teaching (following the retrospective perspective) during teacher education and a long-term teaching practicum. It is assumed that the ADT-S affects not only the motivation to choose a teaching career but that the ADT-S could complement established field observations and qualitative approaches in the investigation of dialogic teaching.

Acknowledgements This study was supported by the German Ministry of Education and Research under Grant No. 16DHL1023 to the first author.

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SECTION IV

Dialogic education for literacy and language

SECTION INTRODUCTION Dialogic education for literacy and language Fiona Maine

The chapters in this section all relate to the teaching contexts for literacy and language itself. The chapters reflect the broad spectrum of theory and research in this area, considering the teaching of oracy skills in their own right; different approaches to dialogic pedagogy in the teaching of reading and writing; and then a consideration of how teachers orientate themselves within a dialogic pedagogy and the implications for this. Street tells us that literacy is a social practice (1984), and the sociocultural context of learning is reflected across all of these chapters with references to Vygotsky (1962, 1978) and Wertsch (1991) throughout. However, there are broader philosophical considerations at play here too. Not only is the consideration of the actual language that children and teachers use in literacy classrooms discussed but larger questions too. Can we engage dialogically with a text? How might teachers’ different value orientations affect their dialogic practice? What about considering literacy beyond the classroom, looking at its transformative potential for people in prisons, care-homes and other diverse contexts? We start the section with a case for the inclusion of oracy as a key part of the literacy curriculum. Mercer, Mannion and Warwick argue that in order for language to be used effectively for interthinking (Littleton & Mercer, 2013) we need to consider and teach for its development. The authors present a conceptual framework of oracy skills, highlighting the physical, linguistic, cognitive, social and emotional dimensions of language development. Exploring different programmes that prioritise the development of children’s language skills, they acknowledge the significant differences in children’s pre-school and home experiences as a further justification for embedding the teaching of oracy within the curriculum and teacher training, and introduce a useful toolkit for the assessment of such skills. Following this chapter, attention turns to the development of tools for the analysis of classroom dialogue in literacy. After introducing the notion of dialogic pedagogy, Rojas Drummond takes us on a journey through a series of related studies where different talking-together interventions have supported the development of children’s literacy learning as they read and write together. She highlights the potential of different tools for the analysis of dialogue and also presents a natural evolution of literacy studies that increasingly includes the multimodal features of literacy as different text genres work across modes. The next cluster of chapters specifically consider different contexts for reading. Wilkinson, Soter, Murphy and Lightner start with a focus on the affordances of small group reading instruction approaches and the development of literate thinking. Drawing on over 15 years of research 289

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the authors present a fascinating account of studies of reading where they carefully tease out the differences between reading group approaches across a number of parameters. Their results lead to interesting observations about the different stances that the readers take and how these relate to the amount of control teachers and students have over the choice of topic or text and who has authority control of turns. Recognising the value of different approaches they note that shared control of topics and turns allows teachers to model and scaffold learning and for children to find space for interpretation and opinion. The multimodal potential of reading is highlighted in the next chapter where broader concepts of dialogue are discussed. If reading is seen as meaning-making and the interaction of texts and readers within a context, can this process be regarded as dialogic? Maine presents cases from a series of studies that analyse children’s interactions as they talk together to make meaning from a variety of different visual texts including pictures, short films and video games. She highlights the importance of the hypothetical language as a tool for engaging creatively with different texts and points to the importance of classroom contexts where children are able to explore meaning potential from a range of rich and ambiguous textual sources. The next chapter in the cluster looking specifically at the dialogic potential of reading instruction takes us beyond the classroom to explore literary discussions around classic texts. Soler describes Dialogic Literary Gatherings (DLG) as spaces for facilitating a context of freedom and respect, in opposition to more hierarchical approaches to learning and teaching. She describes how the DLG project started out as an adult-learning venture but has had much global success in classrooms. The essence of the DLG is to prioritise the importance of reading together and exploring interpretations but with the very specific feature of using classical literature to do so and to act as a springboard into bigger philosophical contemplation. Soler’s intriguing chapter is interspersed with individual cases from the diverse contexts in which the DLGs have taken root. Attention turns away from reading in the next chapter by Myhill and Newman as they discuss the importance of metalinguistics for the teaching of writing. In the chapter the authors reflect on the different approaches historically taken to examine children’s writing development and present an integrated model which considers the individual, social and textual elements of writing. They highlight the role of metacognition in writing which is manifested through self-monitoring and task management. Importantly they present metalinguistics as centrally concerned with writer’s choice and show how such metatalk can involve individuals thinking about writing and the shared understandings developed within the classroom as a writing community. They argue that metatalk is ‘consciousness-building’, describing it as epistemologically dialogic. They argue the process of writing to be about linguistic choice rather than linguistic performance, in contrast to current trends in the assessment culture associated with grammar in the UK educations system at least. We round up this section by zooming out into a consideration of not just the teacher’s potential role in promoting a dialogic classroom but how their different value orientations might lead them to different dialogic practices. Aukerman and Boyd set out to map dialogic literacy practice as ‘enacted value orientation’ and consider three overarching domains: orientations relating to how language unfolds (where teachers focus on high quality talk); how thinking unfolds (prioritising how children think and mastery of content); and orientations towards communities and relationships (prioritising interpretive authority and enacted ethic of relating). They highlight the challenges on the ground in classrooms to consider whose ideas count and how teachers can authentically accept difference, if the stance prioritising critical engagement over interpretation is seen as more valid in literacy instruction. The authors present a notion of dialogic repertoire encompassing all three domains that fits within wider, potentially less dialogic, value orientations at play in the classroom. 290

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References Littleton, K., & Mercer, N. (2013) Interthinking: Putting Talk to Work. London: Routledge. Street, B. (1984) Literacy in Theory and Practice (Vol. 9). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vygotsky, L. (1962) Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wertsch, J.V. (1991) Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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20 ORACY EDUCATION The development of young people’s spoken language skills Neil Mercer, James Mannion and Paul Warwick

Introduction In this chapter, we are concerned with the development of young people’s spoken language skills and with research that suggests that its development has significant implications for their educational progress and wider social opportunities. We first of all consider the meaning and value of the concept and term ‘oracy’. Then we consider the relationship between spoken language development and young people’s cognitive development and learning. Next, we examine the research basis for the view that the development of spoken language should be given explicit and significant attention in school-based education. This is followed by an analysis of the various skills which comprise capability in spoken language use, and we consider how these may be taught in school. We also discuss some implications of this research for educational policy and practice.

Defining oracy The importance of rhetoric – the ability to use spoken language to persuade or convince – has been recognised since at least 600 bce, when it first featured in the schools of the Sophists of Ancient Greece, as well as in later writings such as Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric and Plato’s Republic. In Ancient Rome and throughout the Middle Ages, rhetoric was taught in universities as one of the three liberal arts that made up the ‘Trivium’, alongside logic and grammar. In 19th century London, it was possible to get a free education in rhetoric but not in mathematics (Lancaster, 2016). More recently, the value of spoken language in education systems has diminished, especially within the state-funded sector, as increasing emphasis has been placed on the importance of written literacy and numeracy. The word ‘oracy’ was coined in 1965, in an attempt by a professor of education, Andrew Wilkinson, to place speaking and listening on an equal footing with literacy and numeracy. Wilkinson defined oracy simply as ‘the ability to use the oral skills of speaking and listening’ (Wilkinson, 1965, p. 13). Some researchers, policy makers and practitioners readily adopted the term, and it was used in the late 20th century in the foundation of a National Oracy Project in the UK (Norman, 1992) and Oracy Australia (www.oracy.org.au). However, other terms such as ‘speaking and listening’ have continued to be used more widely in the English-speaking world. 292

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Alexander has argued that such terms ‘have become devalued by casual use’ (Alexander, 2012, p. 2), and thus the term ‘oracy’ represents the best choice for educational researchers and practitioners. We agree with those sentiments, and so in this chapter ‘oracy’ is used to refer to young people’s skills in using spoken language (whether their first, second or additional) to communicate across a range of formal and informal settings. As a result of the resurrection of the concept of oracy in educational research, policy and practice (which we discuss next) we would now locate our own continuing work on collaborative learning and the development of children’s language and reasoning skills within its broader sphere. Discussions of oracy education in the media often focus on presentational public speaking or debating, but using talk in other ways, for example to work effectively in a group, to help someone learn or solve a problem or provide effective instruction or guidance, is also part of oracy. Engaging in the reasoned discussions of ‘Exploratory Talk’ (Mercer & Dawes, 2008; Mercer & Littleton, 2013) or ‘Accountable talk’ (Michaels, O’Connor & Resnick, 2008) requires particular skills in using spoken language. ‘Listening’ is also rightly included in Wilkinson’s definition of oracy, though the development of listening skills is often overlooked. As Wells (1996) put it, language offers us a ‘toolkit’ for pursuing life’s purposes, and we need to learn how to use its various tools skilfully.

Oracy and literacy Given that research indicates that the development of children’s spoken language capabilities can have significant consequences for a range of cognitive, social and emotional outcomes, it is unfortunate that oracy has commonly been the ‘poor relation’ of literacy and numeracy, being given much less – if any – explicit attention in schools in most countries (Millard & Menzies, 2016). Some researchers’ conceptions of literacy education have included both spoken and written language, such as the ‘multiliteracies’ perspective of The New London Group (1996) which recognises the range of skills, styles and language varieties which may be used by individuals to negotiate the social world, but these enlightened views have not had a major impact on educational policy or the breadth of school curricula. There is a well-established North American tradition of teaching effective speaking as part of ‘rhetoric’ within higher education English courses, but there is only rarely anything equivalent in mainstream school-based education.

The relationship between talk, thinking and learning In recent years, research in developmental psychology, linguistics and education has given increasing emphasis to the importance of talk in children’s cognitive and social development (van Oers, Elbers, Wardekker & van der Vee, 2008; Whitebread, Mercer, Howe & Tolmie, 2013). Such research has provided empirical support for the sociocultural perspective originated by Vygotsky (1962, 1978), who recognised the central importance of language for children’s cognitive development and learning in a way that his influential contemporary, Piaget (e.g. 1971) did not. Research in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology now supports the view that language is an integrated component of human cognition (Goswami, 2009; Mercier & Sperber, 2011), rather than a separate and distinct capability (Pinker, 2007). The capacity to jointly plan actions and review them collectively is unique to humans; language enables this process of ‘interthinking’: the ‘everyday process whereby people collectively and creatively use talk to solve problems and make joint sense of the world’ (Littleton & Mercer, 2013, p. 115). We have argued that conceptions of human evolutionary development that emphasise the importance of competition between individuals for the success of our species are misguided. Human intelligence 293

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has evolved in conjunction with the evolution of language to become inherently social; it is our sophisticated capacity for collaboration which has enabled us to become the dominant species (Mercer, 2013, 2016a). Through being involved in spoken dialogues from their earliest years, children discover how others make sense of the world, how they reason about causes and effects and how they express their emotions and identities. These discoveries, and the structures of language, shape the forms of their own thinking. For example, implementations of the language-based teaching approach called ‘Thinking Together’ have shown that children improve their individual scores on a reasoning test when they are explicitly taught by a teacher how to use talk effectively in groups, suggesting that they learn to reason alone through first reasoning collectively (Mercer, Wegerif & Dawes, 1999; Mercer & Littleton, 2007). Overall, research supports the view that language skills are integrated with non-verbal reasoning skills and that language experience is linked to the development of those skills (Baker, 2006; Mercer, 2016b). However, children are not born with language ‘hard-wired’ into their cognition: although they have been evolutionarily designed to acquire language, they have to learn it through experience – and learn how to use it effectively in a variety of contexts. By the time they reach secondary school, some children may know how to carry on informal conversations but not have developed the ability to speak confidently to a public audience or engage in a reasoned debate. Some have developed larger vocabularies than others. Individual children may therefore develop very different oracy skill profiles. Such diversity may affect children’s ability to participate in school education, as well as their capacity to engage in different types of social encounters outside school. Research has shown that the amount and quality of pre-school children’s conversations in the home are good predictors of educational attainment in secondary school (Hart & Risley, 1995; Goswami & Bryant, 2007; Gilkerson et al., 2018). A systematic review of research (Howe & Abedin, 2013) has found positive associations between student learning and the use of extended and cumulative responses in group interactions, and that such capabilities can be developed through specific teaching about how to use talk effectively to engage in reasoned discussions (Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Mannion & Mercer, 2016). Overall, this encourages the view that the extent to which schools give direct attention to oracy will not only enable students to use language effectively across a range of contexts but also influence their learning and cognitive development.

Oracy education Although coined so many years ago, the terms ‘oracy’ and ‘oracy education’ have only recently started to become actively used in public discourse about the content and purposes of education. This seems to be linked to a growing international awareness of the importance of spoken language skills for many aspects of work and social life, even in this modern world of digital communication. In recent years, though, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of the effective use of spoken language in many occupations. Employers commonly look for people who can make clear presentations, work well in teams, listen effectively and solve problems collaboratively, and they report that school leavers are often ill-equipped, in terms of their communication skills, for the workplace (UKCES, 2010, p. 16). A report on skills for employability commissioned by the London Chamber of Commerce stated: ‘Softer skills, such as team working and communication, are an important aspect of an individual’s employability, and they will be in higher demand as we move towards a more knowledge-intensive economy’ (Wright, Brinkley & Clayton, 2010, p. 8). Moreover, these ‘soft skills’ equip young people for full participation in democratic processes and life in general – as reflected in the recent addition of 294

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a ‘collaborative problem-solving’ test to the international OECD PISA assessments, alongside the standard assessments of literacy, numeracy and science (OECD, 2017a). In a recent editorial, the OECD’s Director for Education and Skills pointed out that these skills are likely to become even more crucial to people in the future (OECD, 2017b, p. 5). It has thus been argued by international organisations like the English Speaking Union (ESU, 2016) that there is a strong moral and economic imperative for schools to develop the oracy skills of their students; and in England and other jurisdictions such as Singapore some schools have been created in which oracy has a central place in the curriculum (Gaunt & Stott, 2019).1 The Welsh government has set a good example by making oracy an explicit strand of the new National and Literacy Framework2 (Donaldson, 2015; Mercer & Mannion, 2018).

An important distinction As we have explained, oracy education refers to the direct, explicit teaching of speaking and listening skills as part of the curriculum, comparable to the direct, explicit teaching of algebraic skills as part of mathematics or drawing skills as part of art. It is therefore a curricular concept, and advocates of oracy education, such as ourselves, suggest that it should have a place as a curriculum subject, providing the grounding needed for young people’s appropriate use of speaking and listening skills in curricular and wider contexts. To avoid confusion, we wish to make an explicit distinction here between this curricular concept and another which appears in the title of this handbook: dialogic teaching. Dialogic teaching refers to the use of the best, evidence-based talk strategies for teaching an understanding of any subject, whether it be maths, history, English, a second language, sport, oracy or any curriculum subject. Whilst not denying the importance of direct instruction or teachers’ use of ‘authoritative talk’ (Mortimer & Scott, 2003), dialogic teaching is therefore concerned with encouraging students to engage in the reasoning, questioning, evidence use and collaborative building of ideas that can lead to a genuine understanding of curriculum content. It is therefore a pedagogic concept rather than a curricular one. Of course, dialogic teaching and oracy education are intimately related. ‘Dialogic’ approaches to education (e.g. Alexander, 2008; Mortimer & Scott, 2003; Wegerif, 2013; Wells & Arauz, 2006; Littleton & Mercer, 2007) recognise the need for learners, as well as teachers, to develop skills in using language to construct knowledge and understanding. The concept of dialogic teaching gives a special emphasis to the educational importance of talk which is lacking in both traditional curricula and traditional pedagogies. But understanding that these two concepts are different in character, whilst intimately related, is central to the research and development activities designed to promote an uptake of either or both.

Spoken language and technology In this chapter we discuss the use of spoken communication in different contexts, but we do not discuss in any detail the range of such contexts which people will encounter in the world today. In leaving such matters rather abstract, we may seem not to acknowledge the pervasive digital mediation of communication in the 21st century or the use of digital technology to support collaborative discussion and learning. This may seem strange, given that some of our own work has focused on ways in which classroom dialogue might be influenced by technology (for a review of that work, see Mercer, Hennessy & Warwick, 2017). However, space constraints prevent us making those wider connections. Other chapters in this volume do consider links between spoken dialogue and technology, including Chapter 27 by Major and Warwick. 295

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The component skills of oracy There have been several systematic attempts to identify the specific skills that constitute oracy. One of the most recent is the Oracy Skills Framework, developed at the University of Cambridge in conjunction with the London-based charity Voice 21, which drew upon the substantial body of prior work (Mercer, Warwick & Ahmed, 2016). It identifies four domains of skill in using spoken language: physical, linguistic, cognitive and social and emotional. Within each domain subsets of skills can be identified as illustrated by the exemplars in Figure 20.1. The rationale for creating an oracy skills framework is that people encounter a variety of communicative situations in their lives, each of which may require a different subset of skills. For example, consider the following situations: •• ••

Formal speech or presentation Group problem-solving task

PHYSICAL 1. Voice 2. Body language

LINGUISTIC 3. Vocabulary 4. Language variety 5. Structure 6. Rhetorical techniques

COGNITIVE 7. Content 8. Clarifying and summarising 9. Self-regualtion 10. Reasoning 11. Audience awareness

SOCIAL & EMOTIONAL 12. Working with others 13. Listening and responding 14. Confidence in speaking

· 1 a) fluency and pace of speech; b) tonal variation; c) clarity of pronunciation; d) voice projection · 2 a) gesture and posture; b) facial expression and eye contact

· · · ·

3 appropriate vocabulary choice 4 a) register; b) grammar 5 structure and organisation of talk 6 rhetorical techniques, such as metaphor, humour, irony and mimicry

· 7 a) choice of content to convey meaning and intention; b) building on the views of others · 8 a) seeking information and clarification through questions; b) summarising · 9 a) maintaining focus on task; b) time management · 10 a) giving reasons to support views; b) critically examining ideas and view expressed · 11 taking account of level of understanding of the audience

· 12 a) guiding or managing the interactions; b) turn-taking · 13 listening actively and responding appropriately · 14 a) self-assurance; b) liveliness and flair

Figure 20.1 The Cambridge Oracy Skills Framework.

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•• •• •• ••

Job interview Telephone enquiry Public debate Guiding or teaching someone

Each of these can be expected to draw upon a different set of oracy skills. To take a telephone enquiry as an example: ‘physical’ considerations might include fluency, pace and pronunciation; ‘linguistically’, register is likely to be important, since telephone conversations cannot rely on body language or facial expressions; ‘cognitively’, the structure and organisation of talk will take priority on a short call; while ‘socially and emotionally’, an awareness of turn-taking may be more necessary than in face-to-face situations. ‘Body language’, however, would be irrelevant. To many adults, using such features of talk is usually automatic and unconscious. However, people vary significantly in their ability to communicate effectively in situations such as these, and while the end result might be unconscious mastery, research evidence suggests that these communicative behaviours can be explicitly taught, practiced and mastered to a significant degree.

Spoken language and learning, in and out of school As mentioned earlier, evidence that the quality of children’s language experience in the early years is a powerful predictor of their subsequent educational achievement has been available for some time (Wells, 1986/2009; Hart & Risley, 1995), and recent research has provided more support for that view (Roy, Chiat & Dodd, 2014). While the precise reasons are not yet fully understood, it seems likely that the unsurprising effect of learning from experience concerns the quality of the collaborative process of constructing educational knowledge (initially between parent and children and later between teachers and students), as well as the cognitive benefits of establishing a substantial vocabulary for ‘modelling’ the world in the early years. Research evidence indicates that children’s home backgrounds vary immensely in terms of the opportunities and encouragement they provide for the development of oracy skills. While there is significant individual variation, it seems that in general, children from economically deprived backgrounds are less likely to have had a rich talk experience at home; consequently, when they start school, they are likely to have a more limited talk repertoire (Hart & Risley, 1995). Moreover, because school culture reflects many of the social and linguistic norms of the professional middle class, children from other backgrounds may find their school’s ‘ways with words’ alien and off-putting (Heath, 1983). This can affect their motivation and attitudes to education in ways that can persist for years and so affect their academic achievement even in the secondary school years. If young children have few opportunities at home to engage in reasoned discussions or are rarely invited to express their thoughts on experience by adults in the course of extended dialogue, then they will not have developed relevant skills for making the most of their educational experience in school (Wells, 2009). For many children, then, school may offer the only second chance for transcending their social destinies, but schools will only provide that chance if the curriculum includes explicit instruction in the skills of effective spoken communication. Some researchers (for example, Grainger & Jones, 2013) have claimed that promoting the direct teaching of oracy skills involves the devaluation of any languages, dialects or registers of home communities that children may already have acquired.We believe that this need not be the case, any more than an English speaker learning to speak French need involve the devaluing of English. Rather, it should involve the broadening of an individual’s spoken language repertoire to enable them to deal linguistically and socially with a wider range of situations and tasks. This is compatible with conceptions of ‘multiliteracies’, as mentioned earlier (The New 297

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London Group, 1996; also Barton, 2009). Existing vocabulary, registers or dialects need not be lost or devalued. This view, and the practical steps necessary to teach oracy, are not accepted by some policy makers. For example, a recent Secretary of State for Education in England (Gove, 2013) dismissed the use of group work in schools as merely ‘children chatting to each other’, and quoted President Lyndon B. Johnson as saying ‘you aren’t learning anything when you’re talking’. Similarly, the cognitive psychologists Tricot and Sweller argued that ‘learning to listen and speak’ are ‘biologically primary’ functions that cannot be taught (Tricot & Sweller, 2014, p. 268). This runs counter to research evidence, as we will explain.

Teaching oracy Spoken language differs from written language in a number of important ways. Buck (2001) identified three characteristics of speech that are particularly important from an educational perspective: (a) speech is encoded in the form of sound; (b) it is linear and takes place in real time, with no chance of review; and (c) it is linguistically different from written language. In addition, spoken language has specific features such as the involvement of gesture and interactive feedback. The teaching of speaking and listening skills therefore requires different approaches than those used for literacy.

Developing skills in public speaking Although initiatives to develop young people’s skills and confidence in participating in public speaking have proliferated in recent years, there has been remarkably little systematic enquiry by researchers into either the effectiveness of the training techniques used or the effects of that training on such possible outcomes as improvements in young people’s social confidence, articulacy, academic achievement or social mobility. There has been evaluative research on how interventions affect the development of the more abstract attributes of ‘emotional intelligence’ or ‘social competence’ rather than oracy skills, from which some inferences can be drawn. For example, a 2003 report commissioned by HM Government, which carried out a review of approaches and methods in use in the UK, drew the following conclusions: There are a number of effective programmes to promote emotional and social competence, which have a useful place within a wider supportive environment. There is clear evidence on the principles that underlie these programmes, for example teaching behaviours and skills explicitly and in participative and empowering ways, using a step by step approach, generalising to real life and making use of using co-operative group work and peer education as well as whole class approaches. It is recommended that the DfES encourages the use of explicit programmes and provides curriculum guidance that outlines these key principles. (Weare & Gay, 2003, p. 7) The review also concluded that: young people benefited greatly from a structured programme … that not only taught them the skills, but had teachers model them, give them clear feedback on their attempts to practice them and positive reinforcement for using them well. In contrast, approaches which do not include such explicit skills training, but which attempt to teach attitudes and values alone have been shown 298

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consistently not to be so effective … A study which compared a range of different approaches to teaching social competences found that only specific skills training made any difference. (Op. cit., p. 68) From our own teaching experience and from the available evidence, we would strongly agree with the view that oracy skills need to be taught explicitly, not just as an implicit part of a more general attempt to improve children’s emotional sensitivity and social confidence. Indeed, we and others have argued that the causal chain is more likely to be effective the other way round: that by explicitly teaching children how to use spoken language more effectively, they will develop their empathetic capabilities and social confidence, as well as their thinking and reasoning skills (Mannion & Mercer, 2016; Mercer, 2016). With regard to enabling social mobility, the UK provides an interesting case in point. The development of presentational and debating skills has long been prioritised in elite British independent schools (Stanford, 2015) whose alumni are disproportionately represented in establishment professions such as politics, media and the judiciary (Grice, 2014). In contrast, such skills have rarely been taught explicitly in the UK state school sector (Millard & Menzies, 2016). It is in that context, a society characterised by lack of social mobility, that two recent publications by UK national charitable bodies concerned with oracy education – the English Speaking Union and Voice 21 – have presented evidence and support from researchers, educational practitioners and politicians to argue for the value of training children in the skills of public presentation and debate (ESU, 2016; Millard & Menzies, 2016). Debate has been defined as ‘a formal discussion where two opposing sides follow a set of preagreed rules to engage in an oral exchange of different points of view on an issue’ (Akerman & Neale, 2011, p. 9). A review of research on debating in UK schools by those authors found that ‘debate activities have a practical and meaningful influence on the attainment of young people from diverse backgrounds and, in particular, on the development of literacy skills’ (Akerman & Neale, 2011, p. 5).They also noted that roughly half of the research on the use of debates in schools focuses on the use of debate in lessons, while the remaining studies focus on inter-school competitive debating. A similar review in the USA found that students who engaged in a debating programme were more likely to graduate, more likely to meet college-readiness benchmarks and had greater academic achievement over the course of high school relative to comparable peers (Mezuk, Bondarenko, Smith & Tucker, 2011). That review also found evidence of links between debating and improved subject knowledge in science, history, art and English as a foreign language and noted that it helps students to apply their learning to real-world situations (see also Inoue & Nakano, 2004).There are therefore some excellent reasons to encourage the wider use of debate in schools.

Developing skills in using talk for collaborative problem solving As described elsewhere in this volume, dialogic teaching methods are essentially based on a Vygotskian, sociocultural conception of education, in which language is seen as the prime tool for learning and thinking collectively. As an educational approach, it foregrounds talk as a tool for teaching and learning (Daniels, 2001; Mercer & Howe, 2012).The dialogic teaching approach has a number of variants, and some – such as the Thinking Together and Learning Skills programmes (Dawes, Wegerif & Mercer, 2000;3 Mannion & Mercer, 2016) – include the explicit teaching of the skills of using talk effectively in collaborative learning and problem-solving activities. Research has shown that children from the first years of school onwards can be taught how to work well in groups. As with older children (and adults), this can begin by asking them to reflect on how they talk and work together (successfully or otherwise) and by teachers setting up and agreeing with children an appropriate set of ‘ground rules’ for how they will use talk to carry out collaborative 299

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tasks (Kershner,Warwick, Mercer & Kleine Staarman, 2012;Whitebread et al., 2013). As described earlier, this has been shown to lead to significant improvements in the quality of group work and learning outcomes (Mercer & Littleton, 2007). Older children can also be asked to take on particular roles within groups (such as scribe or chair); they can also take the role of assessors or ‘talk detectives’ by observing and constructively criticising the ways their peers talk and work together. Children’s understanding of the nature and purpose of their talk with peers must, like all other essential skills, be taught directly. Each individual needs a clear understanding of their essential contribution to the talk for learning that goes on in their classroom; like most other human skills, oracy skills must be taught. It is overly optimistic to assume that children will catch on to the complexities of discussion skills and debating techniques by chance. The combination of direct teaching of oracy skills coupled with a dialogic classroom ethos can ensure that children’s talk, listening and social skills progress in parallel with their curriculum knowledge.

Other approaches to developing oracy skills Philosophical inquiry is an approach to whole-class teaching and learning that was developed by the American philosopher Matthew Lipman (Lipman, 1988). His approach – known as Philosophy for Children (P4C) – involves the use of a stimulus to elicit questions from students, before one question is voted on to be discussed at length. P4C has been studied fairly extensively and has been reported as leading to a number of positive outcomes for young people, including gains in academic learning (Gorard, Siddiqui & Huat See, 2015), cognitive reasoning (Topping & Trickey, 2007a, b) and positive social and emotional outcomes (Trickey & Topping, 2006). P4C has now been taken up quite widely and internationally, with training and accreditation of practitioners in the UK overseen by The Society for Advancing Philosophical Enquiry and Reflection in Education (SAPERE; sapere.org.uk). There are thus good reasons for encouraging its wider use in schools. However, as a pedagogical approach for developing oracy skills, P4C has two weaknesses, in that (a) it does not focus on the use of talk itself, but on the more abstract notion of a community of enquiry. Children’s attention is thus not directed to the specific ways they speak but only to the functions of language; and (b) it is does not involve the explicit teaching of oracy skills, though it does provide activities that allow children to practice oracy skills in a meaningful context. Some pioneering schools, notably School 21 in the UK,4 have developed their own practical methods for teaching a range of oracy skills, including those for public speaking and collaborative learning. Available evidence, albeit from a relatively small-scale evaluation at the time of writing, supports the value of those teaching methods (Maxwell, Burnett, Reidy, Willis & Demack, 2015). Of the four language skills – reading, writing, speaking and listening – historically, listening skills have received the least attention from researchers and teachers (Vandergrift, 2004; Osada, 2004). Throughout the last 20 years, research has consistently shown that teaching students strategies for improving their listening skills has a positive effect on listening comprehension (Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal & Tafaghodtari, 2006; Moradi, 2013; Zhang, 2012; Selamat & Sidhu, 2011).

Assessing oracy At any point in time, a child’s spoken language skills in dealing with different situations may be more or less developed because of their aptitude, experience or the teaching they have received. By assessing a child’s oracy skills (even if informally), a teacher may establish which sub-skills are required if the child is to be better equipped for the diverse experiences of their future lives. 300

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However, assessing spoken language skills is difficult. In this section we will outline some challenges and consider some practical ways in which they may be overcome. One overarching problem is that any educational assessment system brings with it the danger that by specifying what will be assessed, the subject or skill becomes redefined only in terms of its assessable qualities. This can then create pressure on teachers to simply ‘teach to the test’. Spoken language skills are as susceptible to this as any other aspect of education. However, we are also aware that unless a subject or skill can be assessed, it may not be treated as an important part of the curriculum.We cannot offer solutions to this stubborn dilemma, but we wish at least acknowledge this issue as we begin our discussion. More specifically, Howe (1991) has outlined three main problems for the assessment of oracy: 1) the fact that spoken language is ephemeral (i.e. it does not leave a ‘paper trail’ in the way that written work does); 2) the number of students that can be assessed at any one time; and 3) the context specificity of speech acts (that is, a person may be a competent speaker in one situation but not in another). Howe argued that to assess fairly, we need to provide students with a wide range of talk contexts in which we can gather evidence. Related to this, several researchers have pointed out the importance of any talk task having a genuine purpose, in contexts where students progress by ‘gaining increasing control over … language to a wider range of audiences, for a greater variety of purposes and in different settings’ (Cinamon & Elding, 1998, p. 220). One pioneering study of collaborative tasks for assessing oracy identified a number of problems, including: the amount of time it takes; the social interactions, motivations and expectations of teachers and students; and questions of group composition when assessing group work (Hayes, 1991). An additional challenge in oracy assessment is that, in many situations, talk involves the integrated activities of two or more people; as such, reliably assessing the performance of individuals can be difficult to achieve. To assess talk in group tasks, it has been suggested that each individual’s performance assessment should be based on the aggregate of their performances over many group sessions and over multiple contexts, as well as using feedback from all group members about each individual’s contribution (Wilson et al., 2012). While this represents an ideal, it is impractical, since teachers are unlikely to be able to carry out multiple assessments of every individual in their class across a range of contexts. It is therefore clear that other, more pragmatic approaches have to be found. This was one of the motivations for developing the Cambridge Oracy Assessment Toolkit (Mercer et al., 2016; www.educ.cam.ac.uk/ research/projects/oracytoolkit). It has three components: 1. the Oracy Skills Framework (as set out in Figure 20.1); 2. a set of oracy tasks, which provide the basis for assessment; and 3. a rating scheme for assessing performance on the tasks and giving feedback to the children. The Toolkit was created through a partnership between the University of Cambridge and a pioneering school in the UK, School 21 (school21.org.uk), and was developed through contributions from an interdisciplinary panel of consultants. It was designed for use in schools to assess children aged 11–12 arriving at secondary school, in Year 7 of the English system.5 The Oracy Assessment Tasks cover three important types of spoken communication: (1) a formal presentational speech; (2) an instructional activity whereby one student enables another to complete a specific task; and (3) a group discussion in which three students are asked to reach joint conclu301

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sions about a specific topic. A Rating Scheme enables teachers to give students a rating for each of the skills relevant to each task. This information can be used by a teacher to draw skill profiles of individual students and to plan relevant teaching on the use of spoken language. By using the toolkit to make baseline and post-instruction assessments of students, a teacher can judge the progress students have made over a period of time.Video examples of children performing the tasks, with the ratings they received, are also available on the website. The Oracy Toolkit can be adapted fairly easily for use with children aged 10–14. Internationally, a range of approaches to oracy assessment reflects varied practice. For example, the Scottish Survey of Literacy includes an assessment of Listening and Talking using Group Discussion tasks at ages 8, 11 and 13. Each pupil is assigned one of five performance categories around participation and engagement (SSLN, 2014). Oracy Australia provides oracy assessments in which the tasks of oral presentation, reading aloud, memorised oral interpretation of literature or improvisation and listening and responding are rated (Education Department of Western Australia, 1997; see also oracy.org.au). In the USA, the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts, adopted by most states, are a set of guidelines for teachers and parents showing the expected standard at the end of each grade of schooling (CCSI, 2015). These standards include a speaking and listening component which requires 11-year-olds to engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners; presentation of knowledge and ideas is another of the strands, and there is an emphasis on the ability to adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks. With regard to international issues, it is important to recognise that there is an important aspect of oracy education that we do not have space to deal with in this chapter: the ways that cultural norms and language variations affect the ‘ground rules’ for using talk in social situations. For example, as researchers we have noticed that in group discussions, challenges to views expressed by partners need to be made more deferentially in some cultures than in others if a spirit of cooperation is to be maintained; see Kiesling and Paulston (2008) for a comprehensive consideration of such issues.

Summary and conclusions Having initially defined the concept of oracy, we discussed the nature and functions of spoken language and its relationship to cognitive development and learning. We suggested that it is important to recognise that language has evolved in conjunction with the development of the essentially social nature of human intelligence. We noted that, despite children inheriting the unique human capacity to acquire language, they have to learn any particular language and how to use it, using social experience and guidance from experienced members of their communities.That led into a consideration of research evidence that strongly suggests that young people’s life chances are affected by their skills and confidence in using spoken language and that schoolbased curricula should attach priority to the development of oracy skills. We discussed some ways that this has been pursued to date and noted that some progress is being made as more schools and jurisdictions incorporate oracy into their curricula. There are some significant implications of our consideration of oracy education for educational policy and practice, which we cannot really elaborate here. For example, if oracy education is going to be implemented successfully in more national educational systems, teachers will require explicit opportunities to learn about its nature, its significance and which methods should be used to make it most effective. We are aware that some initial teacher-training provision includes this (for example at the Universities of Cambridge and Exeter). But is wider provision would require more policy makers, curriculum designers and teacher educators to accord oracy education the attention it is due. 302

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Notes 1 See for example: www.school21.org.uk/design-principles; https://juyingsec.moe.edu.sg/programmes/ alp-oracy-skills; http://bradfordbirthto19.co.uk/index.php/home/voice-bradford 2 http://learning.gov.wales/resources/browse-all/nlnf/framework?component=literacy&year=693835 6_2&selectedYear=col_9&lang=en 3 See also thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk 4 Illustrative evidence is provided by this extract from the BBC Radio 4 Today programmewww.bbc. co.uk/programmes/p04ft2lv 5 www.educ.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/oracytoolkit/

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Neil Mercer, James Mannion and Paul Warwick Inoue, N. & Nakano, M. (2004) The benefits and costs of participating in competitive debate activities: Differences between Japanese and American college students. Paper presented at Wake Forest University/ International Society for the Study of Argumentation,Venice Argumentation Conference, June 27–30. Kershner, R., Warwick, P. Mercer, N. & Kleine Staarman, J. (2012) Primary children’s management of themselves and others in collaborative group work: ‘Sometimes it takes patience … ’. Education, 3–13, 42(2), 201–216. Kiesling, S. F. & Paulston, C. B. (Eds.). (2008) Intercultural Discourse and Communication:The Essential Readings. New York: Wiley. Lancaster, S. (2016) Speak like a leader: Presentation at TEDxVerona, 2016. Full Transcript available at: https://singjupost.com/simon-lancaster-speak-like-a-leader-at-tedxverona-full-transcript. Accessed 19th January, 2019. Lipman, M. (1988) Philosophy Goes to School. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Littleton, K. & Mercer, N. (2013) Interthinking: Putting Talk to Work. London: Routledge. Mannion, J. & Mercer, N. (2016) Learning to learn: Improving attainment, closing the gap at Key Stage 3. The Curriculum Journal, 27(2), 246–271. Maxwell, B., Burnett, C., Reidy, J., Willis, B. & Demack, S. (2015) Oracy Curriculum, Culture and Assessment Toolkit: Evaluation Report and Executive Summary. London: Education Endowment Foundation. Mercer, N. (2013) The social brain, language, and goal-directed collective thinking: A social conception of cognition and its implications for understanding how we think, teach, and learn. Educational Psychologist, 48(3), 148–168. Mercer, N. (2016a) Education and the social brain: Linking language, thinking, teaching and learning. Education et Didactique, 10(2), 9–23. Mercer, N. (2016b) Oracy and thinking skills. In Speaking Frankly: The Case for Oracy in the Curriculum. London: English-Speaking Union. Mercer, N. & Dawes, L. (2008) The value of Exploratory Talk. N. Mercer & S. Hodgkinson (Eds.), Exploring Talk in School. London: Sage. Mercer, N. & Howe, C. (2012) Explaining the dialogic processes of teaching and learning: The Value and potential of sociocultural theory. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 1, 12–21. Mercer, N. & Littleton, K. (2007) Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking. London: Routledge. Mercer, N. & Mannion, J. (2018) Oracy Across the Welsh Curriculum: A Research-Basde Review: Key Principles and Recommendations for Teachers. Cambridge: Oracy Cambridge. Mercer, N., Hennessy, S. & Warwick, P. (2017) Dialogue, thinking together and digital technology in the classroom: Implications of a continuing line of inquiry for developing dialogic teaching practices. International Journal of Educational Research, 10.1016/j.ijer.2017.08.007. Mercer, N., Warwick, P. & Ahmed, A. (2016) An oracy assessment toolkit: Linking research and development in the assessment of students’ spoken language skills at age 11–12. Learning and Instruction. doi:10.1016/j.learninstruc.2016.10.005 Mercer, N., Wegerif, R. & Dawes, L. (1999) Children’s talk and the development of reasoning in the classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 25, 95–111. Mercier, H. & Sperber, D. (2011) Why do human reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(2), 57–74. Mezuk, B., Bondarenko, I., Smith, S. & Tucker, E. (2011) Impact of participating in a policy debate program on academic achievement: Evidence from the Chicago urban debate league. Educational Research and Reviews, 6(9), 622–635. Michaels, S., O’Connor, C. & Resnick, L. B. (2008) Deliberative discourse idealized and realized: Accountable talk in the classroom and civic life. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27(4), 283–297. Millard, W., Menzies, L. (2016) Oracy:The State of Speaking in Our Schools. London:Voice 21. Moradi, K. (2013) The impact of listening strategy instruction on academic lecture comprehension: A case of Iranian EFL learners. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 70, 406–416. Mortimer, E. F. & Scott, P. H. (2003) Meaning Making in Science Classrooms. Buckingham: Open University Press. Norman, K. (1992) Thinking Voices:The Work of the National Oracy Project. London: Hodder & Stoughton. OECD. (2017a) PISA 2015 Results (Volume V): Collaborative Problem Solving. Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD. (2017b) Editorial, in PISA 2015 Results (Volume V): Collaborative Problem Solving. Paris: OECD Publishing. Osada, N. (2004) Listening comprehension research: A brief review of the last thirty years. Dialogue, 3(1), 53–66.

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21 A DIALOGIC APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING AND PROMOTING LITERACY PRACTICES IN THE PRIMARY CLASSROOM Sylvia Rojas-Drummond

In this chapter I will advocate the need to adopt a “dialogic approach” for understanding the development of literacy in primary school children in a comprehensive and novel fashion. In doing so, I will try to establish much needed bridges between, on the one hand, contemporary dialogic perspectives on teaching and learning and, on the other, recent research which analyses literacy as a situated sociocultural practice. Adopting a dialogic approach to understanding the development of literacy entails explaining the intricate inter-textual and inter-contextual relations among talking, reading and writing as participants engage in diverse social practices, not only in the “here and now” (immediate context) but also in the “there and then” (wider institutional, sociocultural and historical milieu). It also requires taking account of the subtle ways multiple semiotic modes are interwoven when participants attempt to create meaning and construct knowledge jointly. I will argue that the adoption of a dialogic approach to teaching and learning enables researchers and practitioners to establish solid grounds not only for understanding the development of literacy but also for enhancing oracy and literacy practices in the primary classroom. The chapter will review selected theoretical, methodological, empirical and practical developments in the field, including centrally those emerging from our own line of research. This line is grounded in a sociocultural perspective for understanding learning and development and has been unfolding for over two decades. Thus, the account will entail some description of this evolution to date. In the Section “A dialogic framework for understanding learning and development in social contexts” I will make a case for the benefits of adopting a dialogic approach to broaden our understanding of how development, learning and teaching occur in social contexts. I will also describe some methodological tools for analysing dialogic interactions in educational settings in a detailed and systematic fashion.The Section “Dialogic interactions between experts and novices and among peers in different knowledge domains” will present a brief overview of some research on dialogic interactions between experts and novices and among peers in teaching and learning of several knowledge domains. In the Section “Dialogic interactions and literacy as a sociocultural practice” I will move the focus of attention to studies of dialogic interactions specifically in the domain of literacy, conceived as a situated sociocultural practice. 306

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In the last part of this section I will further review some research that analyses particularly the multimodal nature of literacy. Lastly, the Section “Enhancing literacy practices in the primary classroom within a dialogic framework” will outline some strategies, derived from this field, for enhancing oracy and literacy educational practices.

A dialogic framework for understanding learning and development in social contexts Why a dialogic approach? “A common language connects the members of a community into an informationsharing network with formidable collective powers. (…) people can work in teams, their efforts coordinated by negotiated agreements. As a result, Homo sapiens is a species (…) that has wrought far-reaching changes on the planet.” (Pinker, 1995, p. 16) Language is so intricately ingrained into human experience that it is difficult to imagine our existence without it, as referenced by Pinker in the quote previously.Throughout history, the majority of human cultural achievements have involved the development of ideas through collective as well as individual efforts. It is through joint and productive engagement that ideas are shared, elaborated, argued over, queried, contested and challenged as our understanding is advanced. According to a sociocultural perspective on learning and development, such understanding is a dialogic phenomenon and its achievement a fundamentally social and collaborative process (Wertsch, 1991). Mercer (2013) has argued that a distinctive feature of how humans function is that we are able to use language to solve problems together. He claims that “we are born with ‘social brains’ which enable us not only to interact but to ‘interthink’” (p. 4). “Interthinking” refers to the use of dialogue to pursue collective intellectual activity (Littleton & Mercer, 2013). Furthermore, language is arguably the most important milestone in human development. In the words of Halliday (1993): “When children learn language, they are not simply engaging in one type of learning among many; rather, they are learning the foundations of learning itself ” (p. 93). It is also vital that humans acquire communicative competence so that they can use language productively to participate actively in an increasing variety of communities of practice over time (Lave & Wenger, 1991;Veneziano, 2001). The field that investigates communicative interactions in educational contexts has a long history. In the decades between the 1960s and 1990s many seminal, classical studies such as those by Barnes (1969), Britton (1969), Flanders (1970), Sinclair and Coulthard (1975), Wilkinson (1982) and Edwards and Mercer (1987) established solid foundations for later developments. Research that focuses particularly on the role of dialogic interactions between teachers and students in learning outcomes has increased substantially in the last few decades. However, the constructs and terms employed are very diverse (e.g. “dialogic teaching”, “dialogic instruction”, “dialogic pedagogy”, “dialogic inquiry”, “dialogism”), and much work is still needed to achieve consistency and congruence (Calcagni & Lago, 2018; Howe & Abedin, 2013), a problem I will not address here. Part of the impetus for this cutting-edge and effervescent field stems from Alexander’s pioneer work (2000). He carried out a comprehensive study in over one hundred schools in five countries. Among his conclusions is that the quality of communication patterns among teachers and students reflects broader cultural practices and is indicative of educational quality. He proposed the term “dialogic teaching” to refer to specific ways of communicative engagement whose attributes make them potentially productive for learning. In this chapter I will use “dialogue” as a purely descriptive term to refer to verbal communication between people and “dialogic” (including “dialogic interactions”, “dialogic teach307

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ing-and-learning” and “dialogic education”) as a theoretical concept to refer to productive forms of communication with singular qualities. In particular, dialogic interactions harness the power of language to stimulate and extend students’ understanding, thinking and learning.These interactions are collective, reciprocal, supportive, cumulative and purposeful (Alexander, 2008). They are also open to new ideas and critically constructive, where contrasting, justification and negotiation of perspectives leads to joint problem solving (Mercer, 2000). Dialogic interactions further espouse plurality, since they encourage diverse voices to be expressed, juxtaposed, challenged and cumulatively building on each other, which results in the possible reconciliation of underlying points of view (Hennessy et al., 2016). Linell (2001) expounds a comprehensive sociocultural theory of “dialogism” as a general epistemology for cognition and communication, based partly on the works of Bakhtin (1986). He argues that talk-in-interaction is dialogical due to its social nature (see also Fernández-Cárdenas & Reyes-Angona, Chapter 8 in this volume). Wegerif (2007) proposes the term “dialogic space” to account for the gap between two or more perspectives held together in the tension of a dialogue, where meaning, insight and understanding may emerge from the eventual resolution of such tension. As part of dialogic interactions, contrasting of perspectives may incite participants to persuade each other via argumentation (Rojas-Drummond & Peon, 2004). Habermas (1984) claims that the social and communicative processes by which we acquire knowledge of the world and by which we renovate and extend understanding and consensus are all supported in argumentation. Thus, argumentation sits at the heart of dialogic interactions. Moreover, its importance for human existence is grounded by recent evolutionary theories such as that of Mercier and Sperber (2011). These authors propose that the human brain evolved to endow us with the capacity for argumentation, which enables us to effectively and swiftly persuade others, evaluate the validity of their arguments and discern who to trust. This capacity has facilitated humans’ adaptation to co-exist in increasingly complex social groups. In addition, dialogic ways of engagement in general, and argumentation in particular, are associated with educated discourse because they give rise to constructive criticism and the formulation of well-founded proposals that are socially valued in diverse cultures. Therefore, dialogic interactions are central to competent participation in a wide variety of sociocultural practices, from everyday conversations to community, academic, scientific, political and institutional endeavours. Recently, the OECD (2017) has also recognised the importance of “Collaborative Problem Solving” mediated by productive communicative abilities and currently evaluates these abilities alongside literacy, mathematics and science as part of the international PISA assessments of students’ educational attainment. All of the previous arguments make a solid case for placing the development of dialogic interactions between experts and novices and among peers at the core of quality educational practices. Dialogic education, in its broader sense, can be both a means for effective teaching and learning (“instrumental” approach; Matusov, 2009) and an end in itself (“ontological” approach, ibid.). The latter would aim to form critical thinkers able to transform culture and participate actively as citizens in a democratic society (Mirza & Perret-Clermont, 2009). Lastly, it is significant to stress that a dialogic perspective on teaching and learning calls into question the predominance of more traditional directive, transmissional, recitational and “monologic” educational practices, where only one voice (primarily the teacher’s) tends to be heard, legitimised and sometimes imposed (Nystrand, Wu, Gamoran, Zeizer, & Long, 2003).

How can dialogic interactions be investigated? “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.” (Proust, 1927, p. 559) 308

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Getting to grips with communicative interactions often requires the use of tools that enable their examination with novel lenses or “new eyes”, in the spirit of Proust’s quote. In this context, an international team of researchers from the UK and Mexico, through several collaborative projects over the last few years, have jointly developed methods for investigating dialogic interactions in a comprehensive, detailed and systematic fashion. Some of these methods have given rise to a framework which combines units of analysis from the Ethnography of Communication (Hymes, 1972; Saville-Troike, 2003) with an analytical tool called the “Cam-UNAM Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis” (SEDA) (Hennessy et al., 2016). This framework originated from a previous methodological proposal developed by Rojas-Drummond, Torreblanca, Pedraza, Vélez, and Guzmán (2013). From the Ethnography of Communication we have adapted specifically the hierarchical and nested units of analyses the authors term “Communicative Situation”, “Communicative Event” and “Communicative Act”. Briefly, the Communicative Situation is a macro unit that refers to the general context in which communicative interactions take place.The Communicative Event is a meso unit that encompasses a series of turns within conversations where the participants, topic, task, orientation and/or purpose remain constant.The Communicative Act is a more micro unit that corresponds to the utterance of each participant, defined by its communicative function. SEDA aims at qualifying dialogic interactions at the Communicative Act level by characterising what participants do and say and identifying the communicative function of each utterance deemed dialogic, while situating these utterances in broader communicative contexts at more meso and macro levels. Consideration of these broader levels underscores the importance of context and how particular settings may afford (or constrain) the dialogic interactions taking place within them. It also highlights the situated, cumulative and temporal nature of social and communicative endeavours (Alexander, 2008; Mercer, 2000). SEDA is composed of 33 Communicative Acts which are organised into eight “clusters”: (1) “Invite elaboration or reasoning”; (2) “Make reasoning explicit”; (3) “Build on ideas”; (4) “Express or invite ideas”; (5) “Positioning and coordination of ideas”; (6) “Connect ideas”; (7) “Guide direction of dialogue or activity”; and (8) “Reflect on dialogue or activity”. In order to capture more than verbal communication, coding is done using video recordings as well as detailed transcripts of utterances and context. Both teams in Mexico and the UK have coded complete transcripts of lessons using SEDA, obtaining acceptable inter-coder reliability indices ranging from 0.541 to 0.877 using Cohen’s kappa (k). (See Hennessy et al., 2016 for a comprehensive account of the development of SEDA; http://tinyurl.com/BAdialogue for the full version of this scheme; and Rojas-Drummond et al., 2017 for an example of the employment of SEDA in empirical research.) Importantly, SEDA is not intended to be an a priori scheme to fit all purposes; rather, it was developed as a result of many years of investigation in a wide variety of educational settings and can serve as a guiding tool that should be flexibly adapted to new contexts and research aims. Already, some authors of the original SEDA design team have carried out various adaptations of SEDA to suit diverse research agendas (see examples in the Sections “Dialogic interactions between experts and novices”, “Dialogic interactions, reading comprehension and written composition”, and “Dialogic interactions and multimodal literacy”).

Dialogic interactions between experts and novices and among peers in different knowledge domains Recent research in educational practices has emphasised the key role played by dialogic interactions among teachers and students in supporting the latter’s development, reasoning and learning (Littleton & Howe, 2010). This research has explored two functional aspects of these interac309

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tions. The first centres on asymmetrical expert–novice relations, the second on the potential value of peer group interactions in more symmetrical environments (Howe, 2013; Mercer, 1995, 2000; Rojas-Drummond & Mercer, 2003; Wells, 1999).

Dialogic interactions between experts and novices In relation to effects of expert–novice dialogic interactions, results are by no means clear-cut, (Howe & Abedin, 2013) but some lines of inquiry are highly encouraging. For example, in an enlightening book edited by Mirza and Perret-Clermont (2009), Andriessen, Baker, Schwarz and Greco Morasso analysed the key role played by dialogic interactions between teachers and students through argumentative practices in furthering learning outcomes in diverse knowledge domains such as mathematics, physics, natural and social sciences, history and civic education. Michaels, O’Connor and Resnick (2008) have enhanced academically productive dialogue between teachers and students through an innovative programme called “Accountable Talk”, where discussions are made accountable to the community, to knowledge and to accepted standards of reasoning. They have found important learning gains in students from a wide range of grade levels in diverse academic areas including mathematics, science and civic education. In another series of studies, Rojas-Drummond and colleagues found that dialogic styles of interaction among teachers and students were significantly associated with preschool children’s competent solving of mathematical problems, as well as primary school children’s high levels of reading comprehension and learning of natural sciences1 (Rojas-Drummond, 2000; RojasDrummond, Mercer & Dabrowski, 2001; Wegerif et al., 1999). Lastly, it is important to highlight two contemporary lines of research, given their comprehensiveness and significant contributions to the field. The first one is Alexander’s series of studies that demonstrated the long-term effectiveness of dialogic teaching in raising the educational standards of socially disadvantaged children in areas such as English, mathematics and science (Alexander, 2018; see also Alexander, Chapter 47 in this volume). The second line of research was carried out by Howe, Hennessy, Mercer and colleagues (Howe et al., 2017; Vrikki, Wheatley, Howe, Hennessy, & Mercer, 2018). In a large-scale study they analysed the role of dialogic interactions between teachers and primary school children on learning outcomes in mathematics, English and science using an adapted version of SEDA (called CDAS). They found that the quality of classroom dialogue makes a difference to students’ learning and academic attitudes. Furthermore, communicative interactions commonly had a significant dialogic component, although there was considerable variation across classrooms. Results showed cases with high frequencies of elaborated and reasoned talk, which the authors termed “pockets of excellence”.

Dialogic interactions among peers One of the most influential lines of research conducted by Mercer and colleagues in the UK has uncovered a powerful form of productive dialogue among peers; in “exploratory talk” partners engage critically but constructively with each other’s ideas, with extended possibilities for reasoning and argumentation (Mercer & Littleton, 2007). Their studies have consistently shown that their innovative programme “Thinking Together”, which enhances exploratory talk in diverse knowledge domains, has ample benefits in promoting students’ reasoning when solving logical, mathematical and science problems (Mercer, Dawes, Wegerif & Sams, 2004; Mercer & Sams, 2006). Some of Mercer and colleagues’ pioneer work has since been confirmed by 310

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our team in Mexico, revealing that exploratory talk is particularly effective in promoting group and individual reasoning, as well as argumentation abilities in primary school children (RojasDrummond, Torreblanca, Pedraza, Vélez, & Guzmán, 2003; Rojas-Drummond & Peon, 2004). In other studies, Rojas-Drummond, Mazón, Fernández, and Wegerif (2006) found that the use of explicit reasoning in the form of argumentation, which defines exploratory talk, may be, to a certain degree, task and/or domain specific. Unlike logico-mathematical and science problems, more open-ended tasks, such as those found within literacy-based activities, may encourage other dialogic ways of engagement, in particular what we have termed “co-constructive talk”. In this, partners generate alternative ideas; reformulate, elaborate, chain and coordinate their own and each other’s ideas; and negotiate perspectives and seek agreements. These results underscore the dynamic and situated nature of communicative endeavours. Lastly, Howe and Abedin (2013), in their comprehensive review of four decades of research in the area, highlight a traditional separation between investigations of types of productive dialogue between experts and novices involved in scaffolding processes, on the one hand, and studies of dialogic ways of engagement among peers, on the other. There is a pressing need to bring these two lines of inquiry together.

Dialogic interactions and literacy as a sociocultural practice “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” (Sagan, 1980, p. 182) As Sagan eloquently argues in this quote, the invention of writing has truly revolutionised the way humans communicate. The field of literacy has evolved substantially in the last few decades. Around the 1980s and 1990s, some of the influential classical models of reading comprehension, such as that of van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), as well as those accounting for text production, including models by Flower and Hayes (1980) and Scardamalia and Bereiter (1986), centred primarily on explaining the cognitive and psycholinguistic processes involved in literacy. In the following decades, however, other significant contributions such as those by Maybin (2006), Myhill (2009), Sharples (1999) and Street (2005) emphasised the need to investigate literacy as a situated sociocultural practice. Recently, there has been a further call for reconceptualising literacy practices – including reading and writing – by taking proper account of their multimodal nature, particularly in the digital era of the 21st century (Jewitt, 2005; Maine, 2015; Serafini, 2012). In the next two sections I will briefly review some selected studies dealing with dialogue and literacy as a social practice (“Dialogic interactions, reading comprehension and written composition”) and then with the multimodal nature of literacy (“Dialogic interactions and multimodal literacy”), mostly from our own line of research.

Dialogic interactions, reading comprehension and written composition The bulk of research on dialogic teaching-and-learning has traditionally been oriented towards knowledge domains such as logical reasoning, mathematics and sciences (as reviewed in the Section “Dialogic interactions between experts and novices and among peers in different knowledge domains”), and fewer investigations have addressed specifically the role of dialogic interactions between experts and novices and among peers in the domain of literacy. However, this latter line of inquiry has recently blossomed (e.g. Jesson & Rosedale, 2016; Maine, 2015; Maine & Hofmann, 311

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2016; Myhill & Newman, 2016; Parr & Wilkinson, 2016; see also Aukerman & Boyd; Maine; Myhill & Newman; and Wilkinson, Soter, Murphy & Lightner, Chapters 26, 23, 25, and 22, respectively, in this volume). Over the last two decades our team has investigated the relationships between dialogic interactions and the comprehension and production of texts of different genres by Mexican primary school children (10–12 years old). The series of studies reviewed in this section has been conducted in around a total of ten state schools of middle-to-low socioeconomic status, and the various studies have included samples of children ranging from 24 to 240. This research has been greatly influenced by many of the authors cited in this chapter. Early work on dialogue and reading comprehension was grounded by van Dijk and Kintsch’s (1983) seminal model. According to these authors, competent readers create a “macrostructure”, that is, a semantic abstraction representing the essence of the text. To do this, readers apply strategies to infer the “superstructure” or underlying organisation of the text, as well as “macrostrategies” to synthesise its content. The latter include elementary ones such as “suppression” of redundant information, as well as more sophisticated ones such as “generalisation”, “construction” and “integration”. Rojas-Drummond et al. (1999) carried out a naturalistic study to analyse the development of children’s capacities to produce macrostructures after reading narrative and expository texts. They found that, although these capacities develop towards the end of primary school, without proper guidance they remain fairly elementary. A subsequent study by Rojas-Drummond, Hernández, Vélez, and Villagrán (1998) explicitly enhanced these capacities through collaborative learning, adapting “reciprocal teaching” procedures (Brown, Palincsar & Armbruster, 1984) that encouraged peers to engage in dialogic interactions about the texts being read. Significant improvements were observed in children’s capacities to produce macrostructures, including the use of sophisticated macrostrategies such as generalisation, construction and integration. Later work on this line of research extended the scope of phenomena under investigation to include longitudinal studies of dialogic interactions between experts and novices and among peers participating in diverse literacy social practices involving the comprehension and production of a variety of text genres. Most of this later research has been conducted in the context of an innovative educational programme called “Learning Together”, which promotes scaffolding strategies between experts and novices and collaborative problem solving among peers, both mediated through dialogic engagement among all participants. The design of Learning Together has been inspired by many contributions reviewed throughout this chapter, in particular Mercer’s “Thinking Together” programme. Other key influences have been the UC-Links programme (Nicolopoulou & Cole, 1993), the High-Scope curriculum (Hohmann, Banet & Weikart, 1979) and Rogoff ’s influential educational model of “Intent Participation” (Rogoff, Paradise, Arauz, Correa-Chávez, & Angelillo, 2003). (See description of Learning Together in the Section “Enhancing literacy practices in the primary classroom within a dialogic framework”.) The first sequence of studies analysed the role of dialogic interactions in enhancing reading comprehension abilities in primary school children who participated in Learning Together (experimental groups), compared with equivalent control peers (Rojas-Drummond, Mazón, Littleton & Vélez, 2014; Rojas-Drummond et al., 2017). These studies used a combination of a quasi-experimental design with large samples (240 children) followed by a microgenetic design with smaller samples (24 children). They also combined macro/quantitative and micro/qualitative analyses of diverse convergent sources of data. Analyses of children’s dialogues using methods of the Ethnography of Communication and the SEDA scheme revealed important improvements in effective oral communication throughout the academic year by the children who participated in Learning Together (compared to those who did not). In particular, experimental children learned to use dialogic styles of interaction for solving literacy tasks. These changes 312

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were accompanied by the production of significantly higher quality integrative summaries when Learning Together participants worked in small groups and also when they solved parallel tests individually. The latter results indicated appropriation of sophisticated reading comprehension abilities.These included extracting the gist of the texts read, as well as inferring their underlying superstructure, applying complex macrostrategies for synthesising them (such as generalising, constructing and integrating information from various sources), linking information to previous knowledge and transforming the texts’ linguistic register (e.g. from direct to reported speech). Further analyses of the relations among talking, reading and writing indicated that these processes are interwoven through subtle intertextual and intercontextual relations and that they support each other in a dynamic and iterative fashion. A second, parallel sequence of studies focused on the role of dialogic interactions in enhancing written composition abilities in another, similar cohort of primary school children who also participated in Learning Together. Macro-analyses revealed that the experimental group (in comparison with the control) learned to compose higher quality written articles, not only when working in small groups but also independently, that is, in a self-regulated fashion (Rojas-Drummond et al., 2016).To further understand how these achievements might have come about, Rojas-Drummond, Barrera, Hernández, and Vélez (in review) carried out micro-analyses of the communicative interactions and co-regulatory processes of selected focal triads while working on collaborative writing activities at different moments throughout the year. Results showed that the experimental triads (in contrast with their control peers) gradually learned to be more collaborative, strategic and reflexive, interacting more dialogically and co-regulating their actions. We hypothesised that these changes might be key in the evolving process of Learning Together participants becoming more expert writers. Furthermore, the enhanced dialogic interactions among children may have contributed to making accessible the metacognitive awareness and co-regulatory decision-making and monitoring strategies which supported eventual expertise in writing articles by Learning Together participants (see Myhill & Newman, 2016; and Myhill and Newman, Chapter 25 in this volume). Also in the context of the implementation of Learning Together, a third sequence of studies analysed dialogic interactions among peers as they engaged in diverse literacy social practices. Research involved microanalyses of the dialogues of small groups of children as they composed multimodal texts of various types. These comprised narrative texts (including multimedia stories and news reports), expository texts (including academic articles) and argumentative texts (including opinion articles and book and film reviews) (OECD, 2019). Results showed that Learning Together participants flexibly and subtly adapted their dialogic styles of interaction to the type of text they produced, again underscoring the dynamic and situated nature of social interaction and communication (Rojas-Drummond, Albarrán & Littleton, 2008; RojasDrummond, Littleton, Hernández, & Zúñiga, 2010). Lastly, Rojas-Drummond and colleagues (in review) carried out a longitudinal study to compare the teaching-learning strategies taking place in classrooms where Learning Together was implemented with those of control groups. Fine-grained microanalyses of selected videorecorded lessons from each group were carried out using an adapted, more compact version of SEDA, to understand how the achievements of Learning Together participants found in several studies might have come about. Whereas the teaching-learning strategies of the control group were somewhat directive, transmissional and recitational, the Learning Together classrooms showed an orientation towards the joint construction of knowledge among participants through dialogic interactions between experts and novices and among peers, as well as the enhancement of oracy and literacy as situated social practices.We hypothesised that these contrasting teachinglearning styles could be partly responsible for the consistent gains found in Learning Together participants when compared with their control peers. 313

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Taken together, the sequences of studies reviewed in this section support the claim that adopting a dialogic approach to understanding the development of literacy involves explaining the intricate, dynamic and iterative nature of the inter-textual and inter-contextual relations that hold among talking, reading and writing processes and practices. These explanations need to take proper account not only of the immediate context of social interactions (the “here and now”) but also how these interactions are embedded in wider institutional and sociocultural milieus (the “there and then”). As will become apparent in the following section, commitment to a dialogic perspective on literacy further requires elucidating how multiple semiotic modes are interwoven when participants create meaning jointly.

Dialogic interactions and multimodal literacy “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words.They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” (Proposition 6.522,Wittgenstein, 1922, p. 109) The studies reviewed in the previous section did not focus on the multimodal nature of literacy (although multimodal texts were used in many of them). More recently however, a team of international collaborators led by Main and Hofmann in the UK and Rojas-Drummond in Mexico has investigated the dynamics of peer-group dialogic interactions when British and Mexican primary school children participate in diverse multimodal literacy practices. This line of inquiry has been influenced by contemporary work such as that of Jewitt (2006), Maine (2015), Serafini (2012) and Soter et al. (2008). Soter and collaborators have identified three “stances” that readers can adopt toward texts: “expressive”, where affective responses are more salient; “efferent”, where the focus is on acquiring information; and “critical-analytical”, which centres on querying or interrogating the text. Their model allows establishing reading comprehension and positioning through discourse analysis but does not address the positioning of readers toward multimodal texts. In the 21st century, however, being literate involves being active participants in multimodal social literacy practices that use other media beyond print (Freebody & Luke, 2003; Jewitt, 2005). The latter include visual and digital modes of communication, which often represent “things that cannot be put into words” (Wittgenstein, see quote previously). Serafini (2012) has emphasised the nonlinear dynamics of multimodal literacy, as well as the importance of understanding how different semiotic modes fuse to allow readers to negotiate and construct meanings. Our wider project analysed how the British and Mexican children, organised into quartets, read and discussed four multimodal resources – an animated film, a narrative picture book, an expository illustrated book and a web-page. In one of the studies, Maine and colleagues (in review) investigated how these quartets self-managed reading discussions from the picture book when a teacher was not present as an authoritative guide. This resource was selected because, according to Maine (2015), fictional narratives offer unique expressive affordances for children and opportunities to collaborate to interpret meanings as “dialogic readers”. Microanalyses employed tools from the Ethnography of Communication and a streamlined version of SEDA (SL-SEDA). Results made evident symmetries and asymmetries in the approaches taken across all groups, with asymmetries highlighting differences in how children perceived their goals and responsibilities towards the text and the task (Linell, 2001). Further, the four quartets engaged in dialogic discussions mainly by using co-constructive talk in an inclusive fashion, and these discussions indicated high levels of comprehension (Rajala, Hilpoö & Lipponen, 2012; Rojas-Drummond et al., 2006; Soter et al., 2008). Lastly, in terms of multimodality, the ambiguity and richness of both the narrative and images of the picture 314

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book, when woven together as semiotic modes, afforded diverse, creative and open-ended interpretations (Nikolajeva & Scott, 2001). In spite of all this progress, however, much work is still needed to explain the multifaceted aspects of oracy and literacy processes and practices in an integrated and comprehensive fashion. Such integration would allow us to fully investigate literacy as a dialogic and multimodal sociocultural practice.

Enhancing literacy practices in the primary classroom within a dialogic framework In Mexico, our team has tested empirically for over two decades the educational programme “Learning Together”, which employs a sociocultural and dialogic framework for creating learning communities within primary schools that foster close partnerships among children, teachers, parents, administrators and university researchers. Learning Together seeks to enhance social, cognitive and psycholinguistic development in children, as well as learning in different knowledge domains, with emphasis on oracy and literacy social practices (see: www.psicol. unam.mx/laboratorio_de_cognicion_y comunicacion/Apj/html). The functioning of Learning Together has been described extensively elsewhere (e.g. Rojas-Drummond et al., 2017; Rojas-Drummond et al., 2010). However, the programme has transformed significantly during its more than two decades of empirical testing. In the first generation of studies, after several years of carrying out naturalistic observations in classrooms, we implemented Learning Together mostly in rooms either designed ex-professo or adapted from multimedia settings in schools, with modular furniture and computers. Briefly, for roughly seven months of the academic year, each teacher, with their children, came to this multimedia classroom on average once a week during school hours, and activities were supported by university academics and students. The first sessions were devoted to enhancing collaborative problem solving and dialogic styles of engagement, including exploratory talk. In the remaining sessions, children applied these abilities to carry out diverse creative team projects involving functional uses of oral and written communication mediated by ICT. Among these were the creation of multimedia stories with animation, voice and music; the production of an illustrated school bulletin that included letters, news reports, opinion articles and book and film reviews; and an illustrated magazine containing multiple academic articles; as well as diverse multimodal conferences. All the texts produced were published and disseminated at the end of the school year in a cultural fair, with the participation of the whole learning community. Children also presented their multimedia stories and delivered their multimodal conferences to live audiences. These activities rendered children’s work meaningful and purposeful, in contexts where oracy and literacy could be displayed as situated social practices with real interlocutors. Nearly 20 years of empirical testing of Learning Together have consistently shown significant learning gains in children in areas that include collaborative and individual problem solving; dialogic styles of interaction; reasoning and argumentation; comprehension and production of written and multimodal texts of different genres; as well as regulatory processes involved in learning to learn (Rojas-Drummond et al., 2003; Rojas-Drummond et al., in review; RojasDrummond et al., 2006; Rojas-Drummond et al., 2014; Rojas-Drummond et al., 2017; RojasDrummond et al., 2010; Rojas-Drummond et al., 2016; Rojas-Drummond & Peon, 2004). We were working against the current of mainly traditional classroom practices in state schools, and we documented substantial benefits to children. Teachers, on the other hand, varied considerably in the degree to which they transferred the Learning Together enhanced teaching-learning strategies to their regular classrooms, with apparently few lasting effects. Thus, transference and sustainability have remained central problems when introducing innovations in school settings. 315

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Therefore, in a second generation of studies, not only the children but also the teachers were the central focus of attention. For two academic years we brought core teaching-learning strategies of Learning Together to the regular classroom, mainly scaffolding and collaborative problem solving mediated through dialogic interactions, with a specific focus on enhancing oracy and literacy social practices. This has been done by implementing a teacher professionalisation programme in situ, centred on cycles of action–accompaniment–reflection, following Schön’s (1983) model of the “reflexive professional”. Results so far are encouraging, with some significant incorporation of the target strategies in teachers’ classroom practices (compared with control teachers) (Márquez, Hernández & Rojas-Drummond, in review). However, the implementation of intensive and long-lasting teacher professionalisation programmes in situ is time consuming and dependent on highly skilled human resources. To address some of these problems, we are designing a digital platform for implementing a blended teacher professionalisation programme (b-learning), for testing in the near future. The aim is to improve efficiency, systematisation, coverage and sustainability. In closing, it is important to bear in mind that a dialogic vision of education, by its very nature, clashes with more traditional, yet still ingrained, directive, transmissional, recitational and monologic pedagogical practices. Commitment to a dialogic approach therefore entails much more than encouraging dialogic interactions among teachers and students; it will often require penetrating and critically transforming the very fabric of educational life in a quest to fully incorporate a culture where innovation, guidance, collaboration, dialogic engagement and autonomous inquiry sit at the heart of teaching and learning. This culture change represents a monumental challenge for teachers, administrators, caretakers, practitioners, researchers and policy makers alike, one that needs to be embraced jointly by all those involved in the education of future generations.

Note 1 During this period we had not yet adopted the term “dialogic”. In these studies we compared what we then called “socio-constructivist” vs “directive-transmissional” teaching-and-learning styles. However, the former are closely aligned with the qualities we now refer to as “dialogic teaching-and-learning”, as defined in the Section “A dialogic framework for understanding learning and development in social contexts”.

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22 DIALOGUE-INTENSIVE PEDAGOGIES FOR PROMOTING LITERATE THINKING Ian A. G. Wilkinson, Anna O. Soter, P. Karen Murphy and Sarah C. Lightner

Just as scholars in dialogic pedagogy, following Vygotsky (1978), view language as a tool for thought, scholars in literacy view language as a tool for “literate thinking.” Langer (1987) used the term “literate thinking” to refer to those activities a person might engage in “to think and reason like a literate person” (p. 2). Her focus was not so much on the skills of reading and writing per se, but on the thinking and talking about text, broadly defined, that accompanies those literacy activities. For Langer, when a group of people read a novel or see a movie and discuss the theme, plot, or characters, they are engaging in literate thinking. Wells (1989), borrowing Langer’s term, defined literate thinking even more broadly as “all those uses of language in which its symbolic potential is deliberately exploited as a tool for thinking” (p. 253). For Wells, the epitome of literate thinking is engaging with text in an epistemic mode, to interrogate the text to explore its meaning and possible interpretations (Chang-Wells & Wells, 1993). The field of literacy is blessed with numerous approaches to conducting text-based discussion designed to promote literate thinking in primary and secondary school settings. These approaches serve various purposes depending on the goals teachers set for their students: to acquire information, to critically analyse the text, or to respond to literature on an aesthetic or expressive level. Each approach is characterized by a certain type of talk and a particular instructional frame that describes what the teacher does, the classroom organization, the role of the text, and so forth. Although the goals of these approaches vary, all are dialogue intensive, give students considerable control over the talk, and prompt students to consider text from alternative perspectives. The purpose of this chapter was to take stock of these dialogue-intensive pedagogies for promoting literate thinking. We sought to identify the major approaches to conducting classroom discussions about text that have potential for promoting literate thinking and to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the similarities and differences among them. Our goal was to help educators make sense of the myriad of approaches available, to enable them to make informed decisions as to which approach best fits their instructional purpose. The inspiration for this work was Chinn, Anderson, and Waggoner’s (2001) analysis of discourse in literature discussions. Chinn et al. categorized several approaches to discussion, including recitation, in terms of the key decisions teachers make when holding a discussion about text: 320

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what is the stance towards the text, who controls the topic of discussion, who controls turns for speaking, and who has interpretive authority? We sought to broaden the scope of Chinn et al.’s (2001) analysis by identifying all major approaches to conducting classroom discussion about text and describing them on a wider range of parameters.The original context for this work was a four-year research project funded by the U.S. Institute of Educational Science and designed to synthesize extant research on text-based discussions.1 Parts of this work have been reported in publications resulting from that project (Murphy,Wilkinson, & Soter, 2011;Wilkinson, Soter, & Murphy, 2010) as well as in more recent publications building on that work (Lightner & Wilkinson, 2017; Murphy, Wilkinson, Soter, & Firetto, 2016; Wilkinson, Murphy, & Binici, 2015). In this chapter, we describe the empirical basis for this work and present an updated account of the approaches. We describe how we identified the major approaches and how we characterized them in terms of various parameters, based on an analysis of the literature published through June 2018. Next, we describe how we sought to validate our characterization based on an empirical study and a member check. We conclude by identifying patterns across approaches and drawing implications for classroom practice.

Identifying the approaches To identify the major approaches to conducting text-based discussions in primary and secondary school settings, we conducted systematic searches of five major databases in the social sciences: ERIC, Education Abstracts, PsycINFO, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Digital Dissertations. We initially searched for titles (e.g., Instructional Conversations) and authors (e.g., Claude Goldenberg) of approaches we knew based on our prior knowledge of the literature. We then examined secondary citations in these documents as well as other printed sources and associated websites. These searches were conducted in 2001 and updated periodically through June 2018. Our intent was to conduct an exhaustive review of all published work as well as unpublished doctoral dissertations, master’s theses, technical reports, and conference papers. We established two criteria for a discussion pedagogy to qualify as a major approach: consistency of application in classrooms (i.e., a reasonably prescribed format) and an established place in educational research or practice based on a record of peer-reviewed, empirical research conducted since 1970. Using these criteria, we identified nine major approaches: Literature Circles, Book Club, Grand Conversations, Questioning the Author, Instructional Conversations, Junior Great Books Shared Inquiry, Collaborative Reasoning, Paideia Seminars, and Philosophy for Children (see Table 22.1). Identifying scholarship on Literature Circles (Daniels, 2002; Short & Pierce, 1990) was difficult because this approach takes various forms and uses different labels (e.g., “literature discussions,” “literature response groups,” “book clubs”). Nevertheless, we judged that Literature Circles demonstrated sufficient consistency of application to warrant consideration as a distinct approach. To help identify literature on this approach, we consulted key sources on Literature Circles (e.g., Daniels, 1994; Schlick Noe & Johnson, 1999; Owens, 1995; Short, Harste, & Burke, 1995) to develop a prototypical model of the approach. Our prototypical model (available from the first author) comprised features that are typically present in eight categories: grouping, discussion, student roles, book choice, response, reading, assessment, and theory. To be classified as scholarship on Literature Circles, a majority of the features had to be present. Similarly, describing scholarship on Philosophy for Children presented challenges because there are many writings and variations on using philosophy with children. We limited our 321

Ian A. G. Wilkinson et al. Table 22.1 Nine identified approaches to discussion around text Literature Circles (Daniels, 2002a; Short & Pierce, 1990): small, temporary, typically student-run discussion groups composed of students who have chosen to read the same text. Students prepare for discussions, often by assuming different discussion roles, and meet regularly in order to talk about their reading. Book Club (Raphael & McMahon, 1994): a program consisting of four components: reading, writing, community share, and the small-group “book clubs.” In the small-group discussions (the core component for discussion), students read and discuss the same book and then share information from their discussions with the whole class during community share. Grand Conversations (Peterson & Eeds, 2007): a discussion of authentic literary texts, often focused on literary elements, that involves daily read alouds by the teacher, extensive reading alone by students, and dialogue that is sparked by a question designed to elicit students’ reactions to the text. Questioning the Author (Beck & McKeown, 2006): readers are taught to see the author as fallible and to interrogate the author’s craft. While reading the text with the students, the teacher encourages the students to construct an understanding of the author’s ideas by pausing and posing questions called “queries.” Instructional Conversations (Goldenberg, 1992/1993): discussion centers around a central idea or theme in the text. The teacher asks questions that may have multiple correct answers and “weaves” students’ responses together so that each contribution builds on the next. Often used with language minority students. Junior Great Books Shared Inquiry (Great Books Foundation, 1987): students read a text and meet with the teacher to discuss interpretive questions about the selection. Following the first discussion, the teacher instructs the students to read the text again while they notate the text with a specific focus. Students’ notes are used to stimulate further discussion of the text. Collaborative Reasoning (Anderson, Chinn, Waggoner, & Nguyen, 1998): students read a text that raises a “big question” around an issue in the story that could be resolved in a variety of ways. Discussion centers on the big question, and students support their answers by citing reasons and evidence. Paideia Seminar (Billings & Fitzgerald, 2002): the teacher leads students through multiple readings of a text and facilitates discussion by asking questions that require students to identify rich ideas in the text, analyze details, and synthesize the ideas. Philosophy for Children (Sharp, 1995): students read philosophical texts that depict fictional children engaged in philosophical dialogue. The teacher initiates discussion by asking students to generate contestable, open-ended questions regarding the central philosophical issue from the text. One or more of these questions becomes the impetus for discussion.

search to references reporting the practice described in the Philosophy for Children curriculum published by the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, Montclair State University and based on the work of Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp. To make our work manageable, we focused primarily on empirical studies of Philosophy for Children. Other approaches to text-based discussion have some prominence in the field but did not satisfy our criteria. We did not include Conversational Discussion Groups (O’Flahavan, 1989), Dialogical-Reading Thinking Lessons (Commeyras, 1993), Idea Circles (Guthrie & McCann, 1996), Point-Counterpoint (Rogers, 1990), or Quality Talk (Murphy et al., 2018) because there was relatively little empirical research on these approaches at the time we conducted the review. We also excluded various instantiations of literature discussion groups based on reader-response theory (Gambrell & Almasi, 1996), discussion-based envisionments of literature (Langer, 1993,

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1995, 2001), and instructional integrations of writing, reading, and talk (Nystrand, Gamoran, & Carbonaro, 2001; Sperling & Woodlief, 1997); these discussions did not show the consistency of application necessary to consider them distinct approaches. Reluctantly, we decided not to include Accountable Talk, (Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008; Michaels et al., 2002). Accountable Talk comprises a set of conditions for engaging students in productive conversation and is applicable for promoting reading comprehension (Wolf, Crosson, & Resnick, 2005), but, unlike other approaches, it is not specific to discussions about text (see Resnick, 1999; Resnick & Hall, 1998).

Characterizing the approaches We characterized the approaches on 13 parameters. Our coding was initially guided by the parameters identified by Chinn et al. (2001): the extent to which the orientation toward the text corresponded to an aesthetic, efferent, and critical-analytic stance (low, medium, high), who had control of topic (teacher, students, teacher and students), who had interpretive authority (teacher, students, teacher and students), and who had control of turns (teacher, students, teacher and students).To these parameters, we added those suggested by Hanssen (1990) as well as others that we thought captured important variation among the approaches: who chose the text (teacher, students), genre (narrative-fiction, narrative-nonfiction, expository, poetry, mixed), when the reading occurred (before, during discussion), organization (whole class, small group), composition of group (heterogeneous, homogeneous in reading ability), management (teacher-, peer-led), and degree of focus on the intention of the author (low, medium, high). When coding the approaches in terms of stance, we allowed an approach to have different emphases on all three stances, and we coded the stance as realized in excerpts of the discourse in the literature or in videos of the discussion rather than as espoused in proponents’ descriptions. We defined an efferent stance as a text-focused response in which discussion gives prominence to reading to acquire and retrieve information. In this stance, the focus is on “the ideas, information, directions, conclusions to be retained, used, or acted on after the reading event” (Rosenblatt, 1978, p. 27). We defined a critical-analytic stance as a more objective, critical response in which discussion gives prominence to interrogating or querying the text in search of the underlying arguments, assumptions, worldviews, or beliefs (Wade, Thompson, & Watkins, 1994). This stance engages the reader’s querying mind, prompting him or her to ask questions. In regard to the aesthetic stance (Rosenblatt, 1978), we took issue with the term “aesthetic” as applied to the discussions because, in our judgment, few actually attained a truly aesthetic response (see Soter, Wilkinson, Connors, Murphy, & Shen, 2010). Instead, we chose to use the term “expressive,” after Jakobson (1987), to describe a reader-focused response. In this stance, discussion gives prominence to the reader’s affective response to the text, that is, to the reader’s own spontaneous, emotive connection to all aspects of the textual experience.2 For the other parameters, we identified who had control of topic by identifying who guided the discussion by asking questions and introducing themes. We identified who had interpretive authority by identifying who evaluated the accuracy or plausibility of students’ interpretation of the text.We identified who had control of turns by identifying who exercised speaking rights in the discussion. All other parameters were identified as their labels suggest. We characterized the nine identified approaches in two stages. In the first stage, we coded all relevant literature published from 1970 through 2005, a total of 333 references. Where available,

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we also viewed videos of the discussions. We did not establish reliabilities for coding because values on many parameters depended on relativities across the nine approaches. In other words, we needed to develop an understanding of what high, medium, and low instantiations of various parameters looked like during the discussions; knowledge of these relativities emerged as coding progressed. Once all of the literature was coded, we tallied the parameter values assigned to references on each approach to determine the penultimate characterization of each approach. Finally, we discussed the values on the parameters in moderation meetings and, where necessary, adjusted the coding to reflect the relativities across approaches. In the second stage, we coded literature published from 2003 through June 2018 (allowing for overlap to ensure no references were missed).We developed an extended coding manual that included exemplar transcripts to guide our coding based on excerpts of discussion included in the published literature and our understanding of the relativities across approaches. We coded 203 references in this second stage. Inter-coder agreement on a random sample of 20% of the references ranged from 72 to 95%, depending on the discussion parameter. Some parameters required only low-inference judgments on the part of coders (control of turns, choice of text, genre, when text read, organization, composition of group, management); others required a high degree of inference (emphasis on the three stances, control of topic, interpretive authority, and authorial intention). When coding stance, we made judgments based on the ways in which each stance was realized in transcripts present in the literature. If transcripts were not provided, we did not code for stance. Similarly, if the literature did not provide any information on a parameter, we did not code for that parameter. Table 22.2 shows the results from both stages of our coding, for a total of 536 references. Each entry in a cell shows how the approach is typically conducted based on our tallies. Four features were relatively invariant across approaches. 1) Teacher-led groups are a feature of all discussion approaches except Literature Circles and Book Club. 2) Mixed-ability groups are used in all approaches. 3) Reading occurs before the discussion group assembles in all approaches except Questioning the Author and, usually, Instructional Conversations. An oft-cited feature of Questioning the Author is that students read the text during discussion. Beck and colleagues (1996) argue that reading the text during discussion helps foster students’ engagement with expository text and encourages a text-focused (i.e., efferent) response. 4) Narrative fiction is used in all approaches. In Questioning the Author and Paideia Seminar, expository texts are also used—indeed, Questioning the Author is the only approach that was originally designed to help students grapple with the meaning of expository texts, specifically social studies (Beck, McKeown, Hamilton, & Kucan, 1997). We found that small groups are used in five approaches and whole-class discussions are used in four approaches. In some cases (e.g., Shared Inquiry), discussions are held in groups of 10–20 students that comprise a large subset of a class. We coded these as whole-class discussions. We found that most variation across approaches was in the relative emphases on the three stances and in the degree of control exercised by the teacher versus the students in terms of choice of text, control of topic, interpretive authority, and control of turns. We rated Literature Circles, Grand Conversations, and Book Club as giving prominence to an expressive stance; we rated Questioning the Author, Instructional Conversations, and Shared Inquiry as giving prominence to an efferent stance; and we rated Paideia Seminar, Collaborative Reasoning, and Philosophy for Children as giving prominence to a critical-analytic stance. We judged that students have most control over discussions in Literature Circles, Grand Conversations, and Book Club. In most cases, these discussions are peer-led. In Grand

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students/ teacher mixed before narrative fiction

Teacher or student led

students

students

low high medium low

Interpretive authority

Control of turns

Authorial intention Expressive Efferent Critical-analytic

students & teacher students & teacher medium high medium medium

small group teacher students

mixed before narrative fiction

teacher

GC

medium high medium medium

students

students

small group teacher students

mixed before narrative fiction

students

BC1

high low high medium

teacher

teacher

mixed during narrative fiction & expository whole class teacher teacher

teacher

QtA

students & teacher low low high medium

teacher

small group teacher teacher

mixed during narrative fiction

teacher

IC

students & teacher medium low high medium

teacher

whole class2 teacher teacher

mixed before narrative fiction

teacher

SI

students & teacher medium medium medium high

students

mixed before narrative fiction & expository whole class teacher teacher

teacher

PS

low medium medium high

students

students

small group teacher teacher

mixed before narrative fiction

teacher

CR

students & teacher low medium medium high

whole class teacher students & teacher students

mixed before narrative fiction

teacher

P4C

Note:   1 Features refer to discussions that take place during the small-group book club, not whole-class community share. 2 Shared Inquiry is often conducted with large groups of 10–20 students.

small group students students

Whole class or small group Chooses text Control of topic

Grouping by ability Reading before or during Genre

LC

PARAMETER

APPROACH

Table 22.2 Characterization of discussion approaches by parameter based on coding

Ian A. G. Wilkinson et al.

Conversations, we judged that teachers are slightly more dominant because they choose the text for discussion and have some interpretive authority. We judged that teachers have most control over discussions in Questioning the Author, Instructional Conversations, and Shared Inquiry. In Questioning the Author, the teacher is quite dominant in the discussions. In Instructional Conversations and Shared Inquiry, teachers exercise a lot of control, but students exercise some control over turn taking. We judged that students and teachers share control over discussions in Paideia Seminar, Collaborative Reasoning, and Philosophy for Children. In these discussions, the teacher chooses the text and either controls or shares control of the topic, but students have considerable interpretative authority and control over turns. In Paideia Seminar and Philosophy for Children, the teacher exercises some control over turns, presumably because of the need to manage speaking rights in whole-class discussions. We judged that the focus on author intention was low to medium in all but one approach. With the exception of Questioning the Author, talking about author intent seems to be incidental to the discussion. In Questioning the Author, talking about what the author intended is part of the rationale for the approach, and we judged the focus on author intent to be high.

Validating the high-inference ratings As a check on our ratings, we conducted a study to validate our ratings of stance and of the other high-inference parameters—who has control of topic, who has interpretive authority, emphasis on authorial intent—by asking undergraduate and graduate students to rate transcripts of the discussions on these parameters. There were two groups of raters. One group comprised 364 undergraduate students in education at Pennsylvania State University. The other group comprised 157 masters and doctoral students in education at The Ohio State University. We selected three transcripts from the published literature for each of the nine approaches, for a total of 27 transcripts. We chose transcripts that were: approximately a half-page in length and comprised a continuous segment of discussion; could be understood with only a brief description of the context in which the discussion took place; represented both teacher and students’ contribution in the case of teacher-led discussions; showed students substantively engaged in negotiation of meaning; and, in our opinion, typified the respective approach. We standardized each excerpt using a common set of transcription conventions and provided brief descriptions of the contexts in which the discussions took place. We prepared a response sheet comprising questions that asked the student raters to identify to what extent each stance (expressive/efferent/critical analytic) was reflected in each discussion and to what extent the discussion attempted to discern the author’s intentions. Raters responded to these questions using a Likert scale anchored from 1 = “very little” to 5 = “very much.” They were also asked “Who appears to control the topic or theme?” and “Who appears to have interpretive authority?” Raters were given three options: “teacher,” “students,” or “teacher & students.” Each student rater was given an envelope containing a packet of materials.The first page was an explanation of each of the six parameters on which the transcripts were to be rated.The subsequent pages comprised three transcripts with a response sheet stapled behind each transcript. We used a sampling framework akin to matrix sampling (Shoemaker, 1973) to compile the sets of transcripts and response sheets in each packet. Each transcript was randomly selected from the block of nine transcripts presumed to represent each primary stance. Order of presentation

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Parameter

Expressive Efferent Critical-analytic Authorial intention

Expressive Efferent Critical-analytic Authorial intention

Student raters

Undergraduates

Graduates

4.3 (1.0) 2.6 (1.4) 3.4 (1.2) 2.1 (1.1)

4.0 (1.1) 2.8 (1.3) 3.0 (1.2) 2.4 (1.1)

LC

Approach

3.9 (1.1) 3.1 (1.3) 2.7 (1.2) 2.6 (1.3)

4.1 (1.0) 3.2 (1.2) 2.9 (1.2) 2.7 (1.2)

GC

3.9 (1.2) 2.8 (1.3) 2.8 (1.3) 1.7 (1.0)

3.7 (1.1) 2.7 (1.3) 2.9 (1.2) 2.3 (1.2)

BC

2.6 (1.4) 3.5 (1.3) 3.1 (1.2) 3.8 (1.2)

3.1 (1.3) 3.6 (1.0) 3.6 (1.1) 3.8 (1.1)

QtA

3.1 (1.4) 3.2 (1.4) 2.7 (1.5) 2.4 (1.3)

3.2 (1.3) 3.3 (1.2) 3.1 (1.3) 2.8 (1.3)

IC

2.8 (1.4) 4.0 (1.1) 3.6 (1.2) 2.8 (1.5)

3.1 (1.3) 3.9 (1.1) 3.5 (1.1) 2.9 (1.3)

SI

3.3 (1.4) 3.3 (1.1) 3.8 (1.2) 2.8 (1.4)

3.9 (1.1) 3.2 (1.2) 3.6 (1.2) 3.2 (1.3)

PS

Table 22.3 Mean ratings of stances and authorial intention by student raters and discussion approach (standard deviations in parentheses)

3.1 (1.5) 3.1 (1.5) 3.4 (1.3) 1.9 (1.2)

3.1 (1.3) 3.3 (1.3) 3.1 (1.2) 2.6 (1.2)

CR

3.6 (1.3) 2.7 (1.4) 3.2 (1.3) 2.2 (1.3)

3.2 (1.3) 3.0 (1.4) 3.3 (1.2) 2.6 (1.3)

P4C

Ian A. G. Wilkinson et al.

of the transcripts, by presumed primary stance, within a packet was counterbalanced, and steps were taken to ensure that each of the 27 transcripts was rated by the same numbers of raters within the group of undergraduate students and within the group of masters and doctoral students (numbers of responses to questions varied slightly because of non-responses and other factors). There was no identifying information in the transcripts or response sheets as to the approach or presumed primary stance from which they were drawn. We read through explanations of each of the six parameters and asked raters to rate each sample in the order they were given in their packets. Table 22.3 shows means and standard deviations of ratings of stances and authorial intention. Undergraduate and graduate students were remarkably consistent in their ratings, except in ratings of stance for what we judged to be the more critical-analytic approaches (Paideia Seminar, Collaborative Reasoning, Philosophy for Children). In terms of stance, the ratings were in agreement with ours in suggesting that Literature Circles, Grand Conversations, and Book Club give prominence to an expressive stance and that Questioning the Author, Instructional Conversations, and Shared Inquiry give prominence to an efferent stance. However, undergraduates rated Questioning the Author as equally high on the efferent and critical-analytic stances. Ratings of stance for Paideia Seminar, Collaborative Reasoning, and Philosophy for Children were not all in agreement with our characterization of these approaches and showed some inconsistency between the undergraduate and graduate students. Undergraduates rated Paideia Seminar as relatively high on the expressive stance whereas graduates rated it relatively high on the critical-analytic. Undergraduates rated Collaborative Reasoning as giving nearly the same emphasis to all stances whereas graduates rated it somewhat higher on the critical-analytic. Undergraduates rated Philosophy for Children as somewhat higher on the critical-analytic stance than the other stances whereas graduates rated it as relatively high on the expressive. We speculate that these three approaches might be high on all three stances, though somewhat more on the critical-analytic, and student raters had difficulty differentiating the relative weightings based on the half-page excerpts we gave them. In terms of authorial intention, in accord with our judgments, undergraduates and graduates rated all approaches except Questioning the Author as giving low to medium emphasis to authorial intent. As per our judgment, they rated Questioning the Author as relatively high in terms of the emphasis on the author’s intention. Table 22.4 shows the percentage of student raters who identified the teacher, students, or both teacher and students as having control of topic and interpretive authority in the discussions.The ratings showed some areas of disagreement relative to our coding. Nevertheless, results suggest both undergraduates and graduates perceived a high degree of student control in those approaches that we judge give prominence to an expressive stance, a high degree of teacher control in those approaches that we judge give prominence to an efferent stance, and more shared control between teachers and students in those approaches that we judge give prominence to a critical-analytic stance. There were some nuances. Compared to our coding, student raters thought there was more sharing of control of topic in Grand Conversations. They also thought there was more sharing of control in Shared Inquiry, especially in terms of who has interpretive authority. Graduates indicated that they thought teachers and students shared interpretive authority in Instructional Conversations. Both undergraduates and graduates thought there was more teacher interpretive authority in Paideia Seminar than we did. However, most were in agreement with our judgments that students had interpretive authority in Collaborative Reasoning and Philosophy for Children.

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Graduates

Control of topic

Undergraduates

Interpretive authority

Control of topic

Interpretive authority

Parameter

Student raters Teacher Students Teacher & students Teacher Students Teacher & students Teacher Students Teacher & students Teacher Students Teacher & students   7.8 66.7 25.5

  5.9 68.6 25.5

  7.6 68.9 23.5

  9.2 64.7 26.1

LC

24.5 18.9 56.6

24.5 34.0 41.5

20.5 42.6 36.9

21.3 39.3 39.3

GC

  2.0 98.0   0.0

  2.0 96.1   2.0

  2.5 90.0   7.5

  3.3 90.8   5.8

BC

69.8   9.4 20.8

71.7   5.7 22.6

45.5 15.7 38.8

71.1   5.8 23.1

QtA

38.9 14.8 46.3

64.8   3.7 31.5

51.7 20.8 27.5

60.8   8.3 30.8

IC

Approach

11.5 40.4 48.1

42.3   5.8 51.9

20.3 41.5 38.2

61.0 17.1 22.0

SI

Table 22.4 Ratings of who has control of topic and interpretive authority by student raters and discussion approach (percentage of raters)

40.7 16.7 42.6

53.7   7.4 38.9

36.4 28.9 34.7

46.3 13.2 40.5

PS

24.5 64.2 11.3

30.2 56.6 13.2

33.3 46.3 20.3

32.5 52.8 14.6

CR

10.0 52.0 38.0

28.0 30.0 42.0

22.1 45.1 32.8

30.3 32.0 37.7

P4C

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Soliciting developers’ and proponents’ perspectives As a final check on our characterization of the approaches, we performed a member check. We emailed a 16-item questionnaire to developers or proponents of the discussion approaches asking them to rate their respective approaches on each of our parameters (in the case of Literature Circles, we contacted two key proponents to capture the variations in this approach). Where necessary, we described what we meant by a parameter. Every question provided multiplechoice options and space for respondents to provide open-ended responses as needed.3 We received completed questionnaires from everyone contacted.4 There were five main areas of disagreement relative to our coding. First, proponents and developers of the more critical-analytic approaches (Paideia Seminar, Collaborative Reasoning, Philosophy for Children) viewed their discussions as being both student- and teacher-led. In all three cases, the respondents interpreted our question regarding teacher-/student-led in terms of the roles participants took in the discussions rather than whether or not a teacher was present in the discussion. Second, all proponents and developers indicated that their approach was applicable to a greater range of genre than we had seen in the literature. Despite our efforts, proponents and developers characterized the genre used with their respective approaches in terms of what was possible rather than what was typically realized in practice (i.e., as evidenced in the descriptions in the literature). Third, in terms of who has control of topic, who has interpretive authority, and who has control of turns, developers and proponents of the more efferent approaches (Questioning the Author, Instructional Conversations, and Shared Inquiry) tended to characterize their approaches as evidencing more shared control with students than we had. Perhaps not surprisingly, they did not view the teacher as playing such a dominant role in these discussions as we had when we read descriptive accounts of them. The remaining areas of disagreement were on the other high-inference parameters. Proponents’ and developers’ ratings of authorial intention for Book Club, Instructional Conversations, and Shared Inquiry were higher than we had judged in our ratings. Moreover, proponents and developers did not always agree with our judgements of the dominant stance in these approaches. Proponents and developers of Grand Conversations and Book Club rated their approaches as “medium” in terms of expressive stance whereas we had rated them “high” on expressive. Proponents and developers of Questioning the Author, Instructional Conversations, and Shared Inquiry rated their approaches as “medium” in terms of efferent stance whereas we had rated them “high” on efferent (indeed, they rated Instructional Conversations and Shared Inquiry “high” on the critical-analytic stance). Our best guess is that these discrepancies arose because proponents and developers characterized their respective approaches on these dimensions relative to other approaches they knew. By contrast, we judged the relative standing of the approaches on these dimensions based on our knowledge of all nine approaches. We note that proponents and developers of Collaborative Reasoning and Philosophy for Children disagreed with our ratings of what we regarded as non-dominant stances for these approaches. They rated Collaborative Reasoning “high” on expressive and “low” on efferent, and they rated Philosophy for Children “low” on efferent. We discuss these discrepancies in the next section.

Conclusion The purpose of the research reported in this chapter was to help educators make sense of dialogue-intensive pedagogies for promoting literate thinking.We identified nine major approaches to conducting classroom discussions about text. We characterized the approaches on various 330

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parameters of discussion and attempted to validate our characterization through an empirical study and a member check. The parameters relate to key decisions teachers make to define the instructional frame for discussion and comprise a conceptual framework for understanding the similarities and differences among the approaches. With some exceptions, the results from our validation study supported our characterization of the approaches in terms of stance and other high-inference parameters. It is noteworthy that student raters had difficulty differentiating the relative emphases on the three stances for the more critical-analytic approaches. It may be that these three approaches are high on all three stances (albeit somewhat more so on the critical-analytic) and that this is a distinguishing feature of discussions oriented towards critical-analytic inquiry. Perhaps a high degree of knowledgedriven and affective engagement is necessary for students to interrogate a text in search of its underlying arguments, assumptions, or worldviews or perhaps critical-analytic inquiry fosters knowledge-driven and affective engagement. This is consistent with other theory on the role of knowledge and affect in learning. Piaget (1954/1981), for example, viewed interest as the “fuel” of constructive activity and argued that both emotional and intellectual engagement were important for sustained inquiry (see also Murphy, 2007). The member check did not show the degree of agreement with our coding we would have liked. On ratings of stance and emphasis on authorial intention, we are inclined to favour our characterization over that of the proponents and developers. As indicated earlier, we were able to make relative judgments based on our systematic analysis and collective understanding of all nine approaches, whereas proponents and developers most likely characterized their respective approaches based on possibly inchoate knowledge of a few. One area that gives us pause, however, is that proponents and developers of Collaborative Reasoning and Philosophy for Children rated their approaches as “low” in terms of their efferent stance whereas we rated them as “medium.” Indeed, the proponent of Philosophy for Children responded to our questionnaire item with this comment: In our program the text is only a stimulus for philosophical inquiry; the text may describe ideas and thinking moves useful to our discussion, but never in a didactic way. Text comprehension is almost always beside the point. This gives rise to a different kind of reading: reading for philosophical meaning. Although text comprehension is not the focus in Philosophy for Children or Collaborative Reasoning, students often make references to the text to clarify or support their ideas. For example, in the following transcript from a sixth-grade language arts class, two teachers and the students are having a Philosophy for Children discussion about the novel, Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery. The novel is about a fifth-grade boy who discovers both formal and informal rules of thought and is deciding where to apply the rules outside of the classroom. Richard: Teacher 1: Raimi: Teacher 1:

Page 26, line 1. ‘No matter how wonderful something in the world may be, understanding how it works is something just as wonderful.’ Okay, right, so Richard has got that. Any others? Anybody else has identified? Page 24, line 15. ‘We learn how to think but we never think for ourselves.’ Okay, it’s a very good point.We do learn how to think, but we never think for ourselves. Okay, because of time, we’ll discuss this point that Raimi has brought up. Maybe we look at one line above it. Harry thought he had the answer. ‘We should be learning how to think,’ he said. Then Mark replied. ‘We do learn how to think but we never learn to think for ourselves.’ Right, any comments 331

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Chunlian:

Teacher 2: Allison:

with regards to that point, to Mark’s response? What is being, what is the issue here, in the statement? Wenzhou, do you ever say it: I have a mind of my own? Anybody else? This one, ‘but I have a mind of my own; is saying that, sort of like – I can decide to do things myself, but not let teachers control me, like this teacher may restrict me from doing things but I really want to do the thing but teacher may restrict me or these things. Is that what this phrase means, ‘have a mind of my own’? Okay, anybody can clarify what Chunlian is asking (pause) can you, can you rephrase what you would like to ask? Oh, I was just asking like this phrase, ‘I have a mind of my own,’ is it that it means that I can determine everything myself, I can do everything myself, I don’t want others to tell me to do this thing or I wanted to do this thing but I cannot do this because the teacher call me not to do this thing. I want to know if it is, if it means this. (Lim, 1994, pp. 34–35)

From this transcript, it is evident that the teacher’s questions encouraged students to grapple with the ideas in the text. Hence, although the text in such approaches might function merely as a stimulus for intellectually stimulating discussion about big ideas, it is nonetheless an important stimulus and integral to the discussion. For these reasons, we coded Philosophy for Children and Collaborative Reasoning as “medium” in terms of efferent stance. The important finding from this work is that most variation across approaches is in the degree of control exerted by the teacher versus the students in terms of choice of text, control of topic, interpretive authority, and control of turns and, of course, in relative standing on the three stances. Moreover, there seems to be a relationship between degree of control and realized stance. Discussions in which students have the greatest control tend to be those that give prominence to an expressive response to the text (Literature Circles, Grand Conversations, Book Club).These discussions are usually peer-led. Conversely, discussions in which teachers have the greatest control tend to be those that give prominence to an efferent stance (Questioning the Author, Instructional Conversations, Shared Inquiry). Discussions in which teachers and students share control tend to be those that give prominence to a critical-analytic stance (Paideia Seminar, Collaborative Reasoning, Philosophy for Children). As in other instantiations of dialogic pedagogy, shared control of talk seems to be key to engaging students in more critical-analytic discussion (Alexander, 2017; Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013). In Paideia Seminar, Collaborative Reasoning, and Philosophy for Children, the teacher chooses the text to be discussed and has at least some say in the question(s) to be addressed. The teacher monitors the line of inquiry and intercedes, as needed, to facilitate discussion. Students, on the other hand, participate relatively freely in the discussion without being nominated by the teacher and evaluate each other’s contributions (cf. Chinn et al., 2001). In related work on the talk in these approaches (Soter et al., 2008), we speculated that the shared control in Paideia Seminar, Collaborative Reasoning, and Philosophy for Children enabled teachers to model and scaffold students’ talk while providing space for students to justify their opinions and challenge each other’s ideas. Accordingly, in these approaches, the talk showed high incidences of both elaborated explanations (Webb, 1991) and exploratory talk (Mercer, 2002), both of which are indicators that students are grappling with ideas in the text and exploring different perspectives.

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The implications of this work are several. We hope the conceptual framework we have presented furthers teachers’ awareness of the repertoire of approaches available for conducting textbased discussion and that it enables them to make informed decisions as to which approach to use, depending on their objectives and needs of their students. But beyond any one approach, we hope this work makes clear that the way teachers set up and orchestrate discussions has an impact on the nature of the discussion. Specifically, whether they maintain or release control can lead to different outcomes during discussion. Teachers need to be cognizant of what they are doing when they conduct discussion and why. From the perspective of language as a tool for literate thinking (Langer, 1987; Wells, 1989), different ways of organizing and conducting discussion promote different types of talk, and that talk encourages different ways of thinking about or orientations towards text.

Notes 1 This project was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education under PR/Award No. R305G020075 “Group Discussions as a Mechanism for Promoting High-Level Comprehension of Text.” 2 The efferent, critical-analytic, and expressive stances, as defined here, correspond to Wells’ (1990) functional and informational, epistemic, and recreational modes of engaging with text, respectively. 3 A copy of the questionnaire is available from the first author. 4 We thank Richard C. Anderson, Laura Billings, Margo Criscuola, Harvey Daniels, Claude Goldenberg, Maughn Gregory, Dorothy Leal, Margaret McKeown, Taffy Raphael, and Kathy Short for kindly responding to the questionnaire.

References Alexander, R. J. (2017). Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk (5th ed.).York: Dialogos. Anderson, R. C., Chinn, C., Waggoner, M., & Nguyen, K. (1998). Intellectually stimulating story discussions. In J. Osborn & F. Lehr (Eds.), Literacy for All: Issues in Teaching and Learning (pp. 170–186). New York: Guilford Press. Beck, I. L., & McKeown, M. G. (2006). Improving Comprehension with Questioning the Author: A Fresh and Expanded View of a Powerful Approach. New York: Scholastic. Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., Hamilton, R., & Kucan, L. (1997). Questioning the Author: An Approach for Enhancing Student Engagement with Text. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G., Sandora, C., Kucan, L., & Worthy, J. (1996). Questioning the author: A yearlong implementation to engage students with text. Elementary School Journal, 96(4), 387–416. Billings, L., & Fitzgerald, J. (2002). Dialogic discussion and the Paideia seminar. American Educational Research Journal, 39, 907–941. Chang-Wells, G. L. M., & Wells, G. (1993). Dynamics of discourse: Literacy and the construction of knowledge. In E. A. Forman, N. Minick & C. A. Stone (Eds.), Contexts for Learning: Sociocultural Dynamics in Children’s Development (pp. 58–90). New York: Oxford University Press. Chinn, C. A., Anderson, R. C., & Waggoner, M. (2001). Patterns of discourse in two kinds of literature discussions. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 378–411. Commeyras, M. (1993). Promoting critical thinking through dialogical-thinking reading lessons. The Reading Teacher, 46(6), 486–494. Daniels, H. (1994). Literature Circles:Voice and Choice in the Student-Centered Classroom.York, ME: Stenhouse Publishers. Daniels, H. (2002). Literature Circles:Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups (2nd ed.).York, ME: Stenhouse. Gambrell, L. B., & Almasi, J. F. (Eds.). (1996). Lively Discussions! Fostering Engaged Reading. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Goldenberg, C. (1992/1993). Instructional conversations: Promoting comprehension through discussion. Reading Teacher, 46(4), 316–326.

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Ian A. G. Wilkinson et al. Great Books Foundation. (1987). An Introduction to Shared Inquiry. Chicago, IL: Author. Guthrie, J. T., & McCann, A. D. (1996). Idea circles: Peer collaboration for conceptual learning. In L. B. Gambrell & J. F. Almasi (Eds.), Lively Discussions! Fostering Engaged Reading (pp. 87–105). Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Hanssen, E. (1990). Planning for literature circles: Variations in focus and structure In K. G. Short & K. M. Pierce (Eds.), Talking About Books: Creating Literate Communities (pp. 199–209). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Jakobson, R. (1987). Language in Literature. In K. Pomorska & S. Rudy (Eds.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Langer, J.A. (1987). A sociocognitive perspective on literacy. J.A. Langer (Ed.). Language, Literacy, and Culture: Issues of Society and Schooling (pp. 1–20). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Langer, J. (1993). Discussion as exploration: Literature and the horizon of possibilities. In G. E. Newell & R. K. Durst (Eds.), Exploring Texts:The Role of Discussion and Writing in the Teaching and Learning of Literature (pp. 23–43). Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon. Langer, J. A. (1995). Envisioning Literature: Literary Understanding and Literature Instruction. Newark, DE: International Reading Association. Langer, J. A. (2001). Beating the Odds: Teaching middle and high school students to read and write well. American Educational Research Journal, 38, 837–880. Lightner, S. C., & Wilkinson, I. A. G. (2017). Instructional frameworks for quality talk about text: Choosing the best approach. The Reading Teacher, 70(4), 435–444. Lim, T. K. (1994). The philosophy for children project in Singapore. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 11, 33–37. Mercer, N. (2002). Developing dialogues. In G. Wells & G. Claxton (Eds.), Learning for Life in the 21st Century: Sociocultural Perspectives on the Future of Education. Oxford: Blackwell. Michaels, S., O’Connor, M. C., Hall, M.W., & Resnick, L. B. (2002). Accountable Talk: Classroom Conversation that Works (3 CD-ROM set). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh. Michaels, S., O’Connor, C., & Resnick, L. (2008). Reasoned participation: Accountable talk in the classroom and in civic life. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27(4), 283–297. Murphy, P. K. (2007).The eye of the beholder:The interplay of social and cognitive components in change. Educational Psychologist, 42(2), 41–53. Murphy, P. K., Greene, J. A., Firetto, C. M., Hendrick, B. D., Li, M., Montalbano, C., & Wei, L. (2018). Quality talk: Developing students’ discourse to promote high-level comprehension. American Education Research Journal, 55(5), 1113–1160. Murphy, P. K., Wilkinson, I. A. G., & Soter, A. O. (2011). Instruction based on discussion. In R. E. Mayer & P. A. Alexander (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Learning and Instruction. New York: Routledge. Murphy, P. K., Wilkinson, I. A. G., Soter, A. O., & Firetto, C. M. (2016). Instruction based on discussion. In R. E. Mayer & P. A. Alexander (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Learning and Instruction (2nd ed., pp. 432–459). New York: Routledge. Nystrand, M., Gamoran, A., & Carbonaro, W. (2001). On the ecology of classroom instruction: The case of writing in high school English and social studies. In P. Tynjala., L. Mason & K. Lonka (Eds.), Writing as a Learning Tool: Integrating Theory and Practice (pp. 57–81). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. O’Flahavan, J. F. (1989). Second graders’ social, intellectual, and affective development in varied group discussions about literature: An exploration of participation structure. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign, IL. Owens, S. (1995). Treasures in the attic: Building the foundation for literature circles. In B. C. Hill, N. J. Johnson & K. L. S. Noe (Eds.), Literature Circles and Response (pp. 1–10). Norwood: Christopher-Gordon. Peterson, R. L., & Eeds, M. (2007). Grand Conversations: Literature Groups in Action. New York: Scholastic. Piaget, J. (1954/1981). Intelligence and Affectivity:Their Relationship During Child Development. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Review, Inc. Raphael, T. E., & McMahon, S. I. (1994). Book Club: An alternative framework for reading instruction. Reading Teacher, 48, 102–116. Resnick, L. B. (1999).Making America smarter. Education Week, 18(40), 38–40. Resnick, L. B., & Hall, M. W. (1998). Learning organizations for sustainable education reform. Daedalus, 127, 89–118. Reznitskaya, A., & Gregory, M. R. (2013). Student thought and classroom language: Examining the mechanisms of change in dialogic teaching. Educational Psychologist, 48(2), 114–134.

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23 READING AS A TRANSACTION OF MEANING MAKING Exploring the dialogic space between texts and readers Fiona Maine

Introduction In this chapter I explore the idea of dialogic readers who are active, creative, collaborative respondents to both the narratives that they read and to each other as co-readers (Maine, 2015). The chapter illustrates just how dialogic primary-aged children can be as they encounter texts together and how different multimodal reading contexts can promote their engagement. Coming from a sociocultural perspective that stresses inter-subjectivity and the construction of meaning in interaction (Kumpulainen & Wray, 2002), readers, texts and the ‘activity’ of different reading events themselves are highlighted (Snow, 2002). After a discussion of what dialogic reading in the 21st century might be, the chapter discusses whether it is feasible to regard texts as part of a dialogic process. It moves on to consider how engagement with the storyworlds of narrative texts can be conceptualised as a dialogic process. The chapter is less about the teaching of reading comprehension skills as specific strategies for learning and more about how readers respond to texts and the transaction of meaning making (Rosenblatt, 1994; Iser, 1980) where the ‘gap of meaning’ between text and reader is filled by the process of engagement.The chapter does, however, highlight discourse features and contexts that enable high-level engagement (Soter et al., 2008; Murphy, Wilkinson, Soter, Hennessy, & Alexander, 2009; Wilkinson, Murphy & Binici, 2015), focusing particularly on hypothetical language and provisionality, that is ‘the language of possibility’ (Boyd & Kong, 2017; Maine, 2015) as a central discourse feature that leads to the enrichment of dialogue which is exploratory and imaginative. Regarding collaborative reading situations, questions of authority are raised to consider whose ideas count when making meaning from a narrative (Aukerman, 2007, 2013) and how children can learn to be accountable to their ideas, to high levels of reasoning, to each other and to the narrative itself (Dombey, 2010; Wolf, Crosson & Resnick, 2006) and its meaning potential (Halliday, 1978). To illustrate the arguments in the chapter, I draw on research data of children making sense of visual narratives in different contexts. These are all presented as reading events, as they are all concerned with children’s meaning making with different narrative texts. The first study started out as an exploration of children’s critical and creative thinking processes and involved 336

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six-year-olds discussing films, pictures and picturebooks. Here I use discussions between Harry and Ben, and Anna and Hannah, from that original study, but also present Anna and Hannah’s developing discussions drawn from an extension of the project that occurred over a ten-year time period (recording the children engaged in the same task as 11-year-olds and then 16-yearolds). Data from a second study where 11-year-old children (Wes, Saba, Alice and Katie) played a narrative digital game are presented to further demonstrate how the dialogic space between reader and text can be enhanced through children’s engagement with narrative storyworlds. It is also used to illustrate the importance of the language used by the children in co-constructing meaning. The third study, presented to further illustrate the potential of hypothetical language in co-construction, is different in that it included a teacher to prompt a group of eight-year-old children’s responses to a short film, most notably to encourage them to ask questions about the story. All studies took place in primary schools where I was familiar to the children as a teacher and a researcher. All children’s names have been pseudonymised.

21st century dialogic readers In the chapter thus far, ‘narrative’ has been used as the descriptor of texts and deliberately so. In the 21st century a broader notion of literacy is needed that expands significantly beyond the printed word and that recognises the multiple semiotic resources that we draw on to make meaning. In the 1990s, the manifesto of the New London Group (Cazden et al., 1996) highlighted the importance of identifying multiliteracies arguing that such a notion, ‘overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasising how negotiating the multiple linguistic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civics and private lives of our students’ (p. 60). Literacy is then a social practice (Street, 1984) with multiliteracies capturing multiple means of communication and ‘the increasing saliency of cultural and linguistic diversity’ (Cazden et al., 1996, p. 63). The authors consider various available ‘designs’ including visual, audio and gestural meanings, though more recently these have been criticised as rather text-centric (Leander & Boldt, 2013) as multimodality can be seen as the utilisation of semiotic resources rather than the resource itself (see for example Flewitt, 2013; Wohlwend, 2015; Rowsell, 2012). Making sense of narratives goes beyond merely breaking the code of the language, and several meaning-making strategies are applicable to narratives across different modes. Prediction, inquiry, synthesis and intertextuality are all resources that readers use to make sense of stories, whether these are in written, visual or moving image formats (Bearne, 2004; Marsh & Millard, 2000; Maine, 2015). In previous work I explored the notion of ‘dialogic readers’ who engage in a dialogic process with the texts that they encounter but also with each other as co-constructors of meaning (Maine, 2015). In that study (the first presented in this chapter) the texts read were all visual, with some pictures, some picturebooks with words, some with sound or moving image. The meaning-making potential of dialogue with a co-reader was clear though, as in each situation the children demonstrated their ability to be creative in their interpretations, to build on and find justifications for each other’s ideas and to manage the task of reading together. Dialogic readers were defined as being: •• •• •• ••

Critical and creative: questioning, enquiring and challenging Responsive: flexible and able to build on the ideas of others Collaborative: able to manage a discussion to best effect and negotiate meanings Reflective: aware of their own thinking and their task progress within a context. (Maine, 2015, p. 116) 337

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The context for such readers to thrive necessarily involves them learning, listening and sharing together, supporting and being sensitive to ideas of others, building on them carefully in ‘coherent lines of thinking and inquiry’ (Alexander, 2008, p. 28). In other words, the ideal context for readers to explore the meaning-making spaces between themselves and the texts they read is a classroom with dialogic principles.

Can meaning making from narrative text really be seen as a dialogic process? Meaning making happens at the intersection of text, reader and context (Pearson, 2009). It is an active process whereby a reader takes their existing knowledge and experience to help them connect what they are presented with in the text with what they know and have experienced (Palincsar & Brown, 1984). To regard this process as dialogic supposes a response from the text itself, which (with the exception of the mobile game examples I will give later) is questionable. However, if central to the notion of dialogue is a space between ‘speakers’ of meaning potential where all meanings are provisional and open to construction and reconstruction (Wegerif, 2008), then it can arguably be seen as a space of possibility (Maine, 2015) between readers and texts where readers gradually build a richer interpretation as they test out different ideas. In the extract that follows from the first study, Harry and Ben (six-year-olds) discuss the meaning of the painting The Lady of Shalott (Waterhouse, 1988) and decide that the reason The Lady is sitting on a boat looking glum is because she is waiting for her cat to catch a fish for her to eat:

Study 1: Harry and Ben discuss The Lady of Shalott (as six-year- olds) 37 H  Yeah.. Or it might be a cat that’s dived in to catch the fish [Ben enacts diving and ‘whooshes’] … it’s kinda … 38 B That’s the fish [Ben points at the picture] … and this kind of silvery black bit is the cat 39 H  Yeah and it’s trying to catch it and this lady’s {Harry points at the picture} gone out to catch the cat and then so she can catch the fish [Harry rests his chin on his hand] 40 B right – umm 41 H And then the fish gets eaten by the lady {Harry looks at the camera} 42 B Yeah {Ben looks at Harry} 43 H Yeah that would be kind of wouldn’t it, that would fit. {Harry looks into the distance} As Harry proposes the idea, Ben justifies it both through his verbal response of agreement, his gestures pointing the picture and his embodied response (enacting diving into the water and making a ‘whooshing’ noise). In this extract the children are testing out their ideas and finding evidence from the text to support their view, that is, they are engaging dialogically with it as the picture’s ‘response’ is the evidence they find in it to support their arguments. Importantly, and typically in the data from this study, the children fall into a pattern where one child suggests an idea and the other justifies it or finds reasons why it is plausible. I argue that, ‘the joint construction of knowledge and development of an argument does not necessarily continually highlight opposing or “multi-logical” thinking. Within a dialogic space of possibility there are opportunities or exploration through the extension of ideas, not necessarily the opposition of them.’ (Maine, 2015, p. 21) 338

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In the extract cited previously, the children’s justification comes not only in words but also through gesture, demonstrating the importance of the body itself as a semiotic resource that can communicate meaning. In evaluating the idea, Harry declares, ‘that would fit’, in a recognition of the need for plausibility in the response and an accountability to a reasonable ‘answer’. This concluding comment indicates the many levels on which Harry’s responses are operating. He accepts Ben’s contributions and justifications and shows a meta-awareness of the quality of his idea – evaluating it to be satisfactory. Discussing the same picture, Anna and Hannah (also six-year-olds) fall into a similar pattern of exchange with similar embodied responses and justifications of the other’s point of view.

Study 1: Anna and Hannah discuss The Lady of Shalott (as six-year-olds) 09 H

 eah then she needs like, like went on the boat and she like hanged it over in the Y water … {Hannah holds own skirt} 10 A Yeah, so, what 11 H … to clean it all up {Hannah scrubs skirt, enact washing clothes} 12 A Um I wonder why her hair’s so long; maybe she’s never ever cut it 13 H Maybe it could just like grow {Hannah uses both hands to hold up her hair} 14 A I wonder why she’s got that black thing on her {Anna points at picture} 15 H It’s probably like a little belt to keep her skirt up so it doesn’t fall down {Hannah enacts holding up her skirt at her waist} In this extract, a pattern typical to the whole discussion is exemplified, with Anna asking ‘why’, and Hannah offering a plausible solution. In a manner that mirrors Ben’s engagement, it is Hannah who offers solutions and who matches these with an embodied response. However, Harry’s concluding evaluative comment is not mirrored here, with only the provisionality of ‘probably like’ as a suggestion, leaving the dialogic space between the children and text open for other possibilities. In reading comprehension research, the strategy of visualising or constructing mental images is posed as an important means to make sense of text (Keene & Zimmerman, 2007; Pressley & Allington, 2015). Here the children’s engagement with the text enables a physical embodiment of this visualisation, in what Sipe (2008) terms as a ‘transparent response’. He describes this response as when children enter the world of the story and highlights how this might mean making sound effects or ‘momentarily becoming one of the characters and speaking in role’ (p. 171). In this reading event, Hannah takes a step further and acts as the Lady of Shalott to illustrate her idea physically. These children’s dialogic responses are not limited to language but are multimodal (Flewitt, 2013; Kress, 2010; Leander & Boldt, 2013). With the argument that children can enter into a dialogue with different text forms established, and that this dialogue can be multimodal, I turn attention to narratives and ‘storyworlds’ as places where a dialogic space of possibility affords the creation of meaning.

Entering or extending the storyworld as a dialogic engagement Narrative is a ‘primary act of mind’ argues Hardy (1977), and Bruner too (1986) highlights the importance of understanding the world through creating narratives. Single images, such as used in the previous example, then also hold narrative potential as we create contexts for how they come to be and motivations for the characters portrayed in them. Perceiving playing 339

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mobile games as a literacy/reading event has been argued before (Beavis, 2013; Maine, 2017a; Mukerjee, 2015), and these studies all agree that there is an intersection of playing and reading that is useful to embrace, particularly where games have a narrative element. If static images have narrative potential, then arguably a narrative mobile game where players’ interactions have an impact on the unfolding of the story have even greater dialogic affordance. Gee (2015) describes video games as having ‘a turn-taking, real-time, responsive and reciprocal conversation’ (p. 10), and this can be argued as a dialogue between text (mobile game) and player (Maine, 2017b). Of course, the game’s response is only partial and already programmed as a response to a particular input by the player, but the in-the-moment or ‘lived-through’ experience (Rosenblatt, 1994) for the player carries a dialogic momentum that Salen and Zimmerman define as a ‘space of possible future actions’ (2003, p. 67) echoing the notion of dialogic space. Not all mobile games carry narratives, but those that do offer a storyworld for players to engage in and make sense of through their interaction with it. An illustration of this can be seen in the second study where pairs of 11-year-old children played Monument Valley (ustwogames, 2014) as part of a project analysing children’s responses to a mobile game (Maine 2017a, 2017b). Monument Valley is a ten-level strategy game which has an ambiguous narrative that is never fully explained. The children in the project joined an after-school iPad club to play the game and were invited not only to play but to record their thoughts in their own notebooks and also reflect on their experiences in a group discussion after each session. Two children in particular demonstrated interesting approaches which illustrate a dialogic engagement with the game, and each works quite differently. Saba very quickly immersed in the game (Douglas & Hargadon, 2000) evidenced by her physical ‘huddling’ towards her partner game-player but also her direct conversations with the characters in the game. At times, she would speak as the main character Ida, who the players must move around a geometrically challenging world reminiscent of an Escher-style picture. Saba’s responses were transparent (Sipe, 2008) as she made sound effects to match the actions that she drove the character to make. However, she also adopted a more omnipresent role, verbally directing and instructing the characters as she was moving them around the screen using her fingers on the iPad. In this play she entered the space of possible future actions not just by fulfilling the game needs (the physical touch of fingers on screen) but also by entering the storyworld, speaking down to her ‘minions’, a word she actually used as she manipulated the game space to her advantage. For Saba, entering the storyworld meant taking control of it. She described herself ‘helping’ the characters from her position of power. From a dialogic perspective, this is hardly reflection of a collaborative co-construction, but essentially, Saba was buying into the gamespace by answering its demands of action to move the characters to a conclusion. In another of the pairs, Wes demonstrated an alternative dialogic engagement. Rather than entering the storyworld, he engaged with it by extending it. In his notebooks he demonstrated himself as a reflective dialogic reader who was able to reflect on his experiences of reading/ playing Monument Valley and he focused particularly on the development of the narrative and his changing perspectives towards it.The story of the game is ambiguous and perhaps the characters are not all that they seem (communication with ustwogames, 2016). The character, Ida, that the player’s actions direct can at first be seen as a hero. She is a princess, and there are characters that seem to be working against her, ‘bothersome crow people’ who get in her way. As the narrative begins to unfold however, her motivations become less clear. As Wes used his notebook as a tool to help his understanding of the game, he captured his changing orientation towards Ida and the crows. In the earlier chapters of the game he repeatedly returned to the role of the crows and if

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they were allies or enemies. Later he began to doubt Ida’s persona as a hero and suggested that ‘we don’t even know if Ida is good’. His dialogic interaction with the game extended beyond the story as it is presented to make more sense of it. He explicitly drew on his intertextual knowledge of stories, and in his listing of other games, books and films that he enjoyed it was evident that he had a significant knowledge of the fantasy genre (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars were all cited as favourites). His reflections on the developing narrative queried if there was a prophecy involved or a curse.Whilst the game itself could only answer in a pre-programmed fashion, it was Wes’s dialogical thinking (Paul, 1987) that propelled his understanding, and this was stimulated by the actions of the game as he played it. For a dialogue to be successful parties involved must ‘buy into’ it. As the game of Monument Valley offered more intrigue, so Wes responded with enthusiasm to solve the mystery, drawing on his schematic knowledge of the genre (Douglas & Hargadon, 2000; Sipe, 2008) to help him interact. The cases of Wes and Saba illustrate how dialogic engagement with a visual text might mean entering its storyworld or extending beyond it. The argument so far has considered the texts (a painting and a video game) and the activities of exploring and playing them and how dialogic responses to them might be physical or verbal. In keeping with the sociocultural perspective of reading posed as the foundational theory for this work (Snow, 2002), the chapter now concentrates more explicitly on the readers themselves and how they use language to interact together.

Reading together: the language of co-construction and role of creativity In considering dialogic readers (Maine, 2015), significant emphasis was placed on the role of creativity in thinking and how this is manifested in language as children communicate together. Craft (2000) defines little ‘c’ creativity as enabled by ‘possibility thinking’, and the ‘hypothetical’ is a central component when considering dialogic responses to each other as co-readers. The language of possibility (maybe, might, could be, perhaps) can be seen as having two functions: firstly, to enable the exploration of possible ideas, to be creative and imaginative and to focus on the text itself. Secondly, I argue, it carries an important function in the co-construction of meaning with a co-reader, as suggested, or provisional ideas are put forward as negotiable and open to compromise (Maine, 2015). There has been significant focus on the language of reasoning in high-level comprehension (Soter et al., 2008; Murphy et al., 2009; Wilkinson et al., 2015). Words such as ‘because’, ‘if ’, ‘maybe’ and ‘could’ are included as a set of words that indicate reasoning and are discourse features of high-level comprehension (Soter et al., 2008) and exploratory talk (Mercer, 2004; Mercer, Wegerif & Dawes, 1999; Mercer & Litttleton, 2007). The unique function of language which suggests possibility thinking, however, has been rather overlooked in these studies. A recent study by Boyd and Kong (2017) noted that if reasoning words were further categorised then it was clear that the language of possibility was used often by students in secondlanguage learning contexts ‘to create space for alternate ways of thinking, to connect ideas, and to expect elaborated support’ (2017, p. 78), and this seems true for literacy contexts too. Similarly,Wegerif (2005) returned to transcripts used from earlier work with Mercer and Dawes to identify sequences where it was clear that reasoning was happening yet the language was more playful. He describes ‘verbal creativity’ to capture a more open frame of exploratory talk. I argue that in reading contexts where the goal is creative interpretation and aesthetic or expressive response (Rosenblatt, 1994; Soter, Wilkinson, Connors, Murphy, & Shen, 2010) rather than information seeking and extraction, the role of language which emphasises possibilities rather

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than certainties is crucial. In the Y1 children’s encounter with The Lady of Shalott, such language permeates the discussion, enabling creative responses that extend the storyworld and allow the children’s imaginations to fly. The language also creates a social cohesion where ideas are tested tentatively for the other speaker to build, extend, refute or even ignore.The collaborations of the Y1 ­children are successful because there is take-up of ideas (Soter et al., 2008). Each time a new creative idea is suggested the other child does their best to make it a plausible option or offer a solution, either by identifying shapes in the picture as evidence for why it must be so (Ben) or giving answers based on their knowledge of the world (for Hannah, skirts will fall down if not held up by a belt). There is another function of provisional language in that if an idea is positioned as a possibility, the loss of face for a disagreement (recognised in whole-class contexts by Boyd & Kong) is lessened if the idea was only a suggestion. The prominence of the language of possibility occurs throughout all the reading contexts situations that I have researched. In talking about pictures, reading them for meaning, the language acts as a springboard for creating possible storyworlds beyond the frame of the picture. In the mobile game contexts, the language enabled collaborative play as children suggested courses of action and negotiated the literacy task together. In the example that follows, I return again to the Monument Valley study but this time reflect on the engagement of Alice and Katie who were the most strategic game players in that they paused and discussed their future actions rather than merely being reactive to the demands of the game (Maine, 2017a). Analysing their talk shows how not only does the language of possibility enable them to think creatively about their actions, it also serves a social purpose which enables them to collaborate:

Study 2: Alice and Katie play Monument Valley 12 K So maybe if we go back on there it might show some more stuff. 13 A And then we can move it up. Look she can go back on there … I don’t know … would it build … Would it build it up? 14 K Maybe we could move it somewhere … Up there. 15 A Because she’s got to somehow maybe get up there. 16 K There’s another button. 17 A Yeah but she’s got to somehow get on here.Yeah well. Oh. She went up it. 18 K Maybe it moved. The girls suggest course of action as possibilities and collaborate to decide what they should do. Their use of pronouns whilst engaging in the game is interesting as they ‘flicker’ (Fleer, 2014) in and out of role. Sometimes they describe ‘she’ (Ida) and sometimes ‘we’ which seems to include themselves as players and Ida together. The collaboration then is not limited to being in or out of the game but can be both, as the children respond to each other and to the game goals of the protagonist. Also highlighting the importance of possibility thinking, and ‘wondering’, in the third study, short animated films were used as resources to support the development of reading comprehension strategies, and an emphasis was given to the creative questions about the texts that the children could raise. Analysing the questions that the children asked about the film revealed that whilst some children were confused by it, and used questions to clarify meaning, others were able to raise deeply philosophical questions. The following questions were all raised by eightyear-old children about a fantastical film, Once in a Lifetime (Gulledge, 2011) where a mysterious air-balloon ship is stranded in the sky until a flock of flying turtles enable the pilot to abandon ship and fly away with them: 342

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Study 3: Eight-year-old children wonder about Once in a Lifetime Ollie: I wonder why the boat was flying Nena: I wonder where the turtles are going to take the man Callum: I wonder if at the end when the man jumped on the turtle, I wonder if the turtle came back to save him, or if he was just lucky Lenny: I wonder if the man, when the man jumped over onto the turtle, if he made the right decision, because he left everything on his ship The questions can be evaluated as increasing in complexity with the final question striking right at the heart of the film’s meaning (as interpreted by this researcher!). Asking questions as a comprehension strategy is well researched (see for example, Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Pressley & Allington, 2015), but the potential of the speculative ‘I wonder’ question lifts these questions into creative possibility thinking and enables authentic discussion around worldly issues. Wilkinson and colleagues (2015) argue that productive discussion ‘revolves around a series of open-ended, authentic questions (sometimes called interpretative questions) from the teacher or the students for which there are no pre-specified answers’ (p. 39). Taking a more exploratory approach, programmes such as Philosophy for Children (SAPERE, 2019) developed by Lipman (2003) prioritise such philosophical thinking, but encouragement of the language of possibility can be achieved in any collaborative reading event within a dialogic classroom that promotes the principle of sharing and collaboration (Alexander, 2008). The challenge for teachers then is to build such an environment and support children to develop their responses in meaningful and genuine discussion where their language of possibility leads to exciting and new ideas.

Do all ideas count? The discussed contexts for reading in multimodal situations included in this chapter focused on peer interactions. Murphy and colleagues (2009) point out that groups where students were able to talk more did not mean that there were higher levels of comprehension evident.This is illustrated to some degree in the next example. The first study reported, including the six-year-old children reading a picture, was extended five and then ten years later when the children were 11- and then 16-year-olds.The prompts for the task were identical, with the children/young people asked what they thought the painting was about and what questions they had about it. The results of the comparison between the children as six- and 11-year-olds are explored elsewhere (Maine, 2014). However, when conducting a simple content analysis of themes in the talk, interesting patterns emerged in Anna and Hannah’s conversations spanning the ten years. As six-year-olds, they discuss the boat, the muddy skirt, the messy hair and whether the lady might be pregnant. As 11-year-olds they also discuss her messy appearance, whether she lives on the boat and what she eats and if she was ‘posh’ but hit hard times. As 16-year-olds, their topics are a combination of the same themes: possible pregnancy, destitution and unkempt appearance all feature in their discussion:

Study 1: Anna and Hannah as six-year-olds 31 A Um I wonder what … um … I wonder why she’s got a big boat not a little rowing boat 32 H Maybe cos she’s like a big girl, a bit fat cos she’s having a baby? 33 A I wonder why she’s got those things on the end (points) 34 H That is just means it’s like a little posh boat 343

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Study 1 extension: Anna and Hannah as 11-year-olds 2 H I think she might live on the boat because she’s got like blankets and clothes like … 3 A … and candles. I wonder where she’s come from and where she’s going 4 H She looks like she’s wearing quite rich sort of clothes So I don’t know … she might have been like … lived … 5 A She looks like she’s a bit scared of something in the water, or something 6 H Yeah … she might have lived somewhere like quite posh and rich and then something went wrong and she might live on the boat now

Study 1 extension: Anna and Hannah as 16-year-olds 26 H And her hair looks kind of unkempt. 27 A Yeah it doesn’t look like it’s been/ 28 H Brushed. 29 A /brushed. [laugh] Erm … 30 H She kind of looks like … You know erm maternity kind of bands 31 A Yeah. 32 H But I don’t know why they would have maternity things on [laughs] … it’s quite an old setting. These three extracts could be a continuation of the same discussion and in a way, they are, representing a dialogue over time, but there are five years of schooling between each, offering food for thought. Is there really not much more to be said about The Lady of Shalott? Without teacher guidance is there a plateau for discussion amongst peers? Other than more precise language and extended frames of reference, what differences are there in these discussions? However, if a teacher is involved in the dialogic reading event with the children then care must be taken in considering whose ideas count when making meaning from a narrative (Aukerman, 2007, 2013) to avoid an assumption that the ‘right’ answers reflect a cultural capital that only a teacher can lead the children towards. If the ideas raised by the children in these discussions are accountable to each other, accountable to the text (Dombey, 2010) and accountable to high levels of reasoning (Wolf et al., 2006) then arguably they are acceptable as interpretations of the text. If there is no further intertextual knowledge about the painting to draw on (i.e. that in fact the painting denotes an Arthurian legend and several of its included images reference themes such as death and despair) then these interpretations are valid. The three discussions reflect the sociocultural context of the reading activity which, other than changes in time, remains the same. However, there are ways in which teachers can support children to make the most of their existing knowledge and experiences and to support them to become open to the ideas of the other children and extend the space of meaning making. These practices are also inherent in a dialogic classroom, where children feel not only confident to share ideas but ready to have them challenged by teachers or their peers.

Conclusion This chapter has presented a series of cases of children engaging in multimodal reading activities to explore how reading can be interpreted as a dialogic opportunity, as readers engage with different modes of text and collaborate with each other to make meaning. All of the examples used 344

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visual narratives, whether these were implicit or ambiguous. It was not just the ‘questions’ that were open-ended, authentic and with no pre-specified answers (Wilkinson et al., 2015), it was the reading activity and texts themselves that afforded a meaning potential (Halliday, 1978) and hooked the children’s interests in their transaction of meaning making. The sociocultural position taken celebrated that each reader would approach the texts differently (Snow, 2002) but that the value of coconstruction and motivation for inter-subjectivity would itself propel a dialogic engagement. This then raises a question about the role of teachers in this dialogue.We know that teacher questioning and take-up can propel higher-order comprehension (Nystrand, Gamoran, Kachur, & Prendergast, 1997; Soter et al., 2008), but the dialogue between text and reader and readers themselves can extend beyond this into affective and cognitive response where larger philosophical reflections lift the meaning making beyond the space between text and readers into an understanding of the larger world and how to live in it. The role of the teacher then is to provide the temporal and physical space for these discussions, to encourage children to push at the boundaries of their own initial interpretations into richer responses that widen and deepen the dialogic space. This is further potentiated when the texts themselves are open-ended and inquiry focused, emphasising the importance of careful text selection for classroom learning that includes challenging and ambiguous narratives as stimulus and inspiration for dialogic engagement in multimodal reading events.

Acknowledgement The Monument Valley research was kindly funded by the United Kingdom Literacy Association (www.ukla.org).

References Alexander, R. J. (2008). Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk (4th ed.). Cambridge: Dialogos. Aukerman, M. (2007).When reading It wrong is getting it right: Shared evaluation pedagogy among struggling fifth grade readers. Research in the Teaching of English, 42(1), 56–103. Aukerman, M. (2013). Rereading comprehension pedagogies:Toward a dialogic teaching ethic that honors student sensemaking. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 1(0). doi:10.5195/dpj.2013.9 Bearne, E. (2004). Multimodal texts: What they are and how children use them. In J. Evans (Ed.), Literacy Moves On: Using Popular Culture, New Technologies and Critical Literacy in the Primary Classroom (pp. 16–30). London: David Fulton. Beavis, C. (2013). Multiliteracies in the wild. In G. Merchant, J. Gillen, J. Marsh & J. Davies (Eds.), Virtual Literacies: Interactive Spaces for Children and Young People (pp. 57–74). London: Routledge. Boyd, M., & Kong,Y. (2017). Reasoning words as linguistic features of exploratory talk: Classroom use and what It can tell us. Discourse Processes, 54(1), 62–81. Bruner, J. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. London: Harvard University Press. Cazden, C. Cope, B., Fairclough, N., Gee, J., Kalazantis, M., Kress, G., Luke, A., Luke, C., Michaels, S., & Nakata, M. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing our social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. Craft, A. (2000). Creativity Across the Primary Curriculum: Framing and Developing Practice. London: Routledge. Dombey, H. (2010). Interaction and learning to read: Towards a dialogic approach. In D. Wyse, R. Andrews & J. V. Hoffman (Eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of English, Language and Literacy Teaching (pp. 110–121). London: Routledge. Douglas,Y., & Hargadon, A. (2000). The pleasure principle: Immersion, engagement, flow. In Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM on Hypertext and Hypermedia, New York, USA: ACM, pp. 153–160. Fleer, M. (2014). Theorising Play in the Early Years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flewitt, R. (2013). Multimodal perspectives on early childhood literacies. In J. Larson & J. Marsh (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy. London: SAGE. Gee, J. P. (2015). Unified Discourse Analysis: Language, Reality, Virtual Worlds, and Video Games. London: Routledge.

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Fiona Maine Gulledge, J. (2011). Once in a lifetime. Ringling College of Art and Design. Retrieved from http://vimeo. com/23805703 Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic:The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. Milton Keynes: Open University. Hardy, B. (1977). Narrative as a primary act of mind. In M. Meek, A. Warlow & G. Barton (Eds.), The Cool Web:The Pattern of Children’s Reading. London: The Bodley Head. Iser, W. (1980). The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Keene, E. O., & Zimmermann, S. (2007). Mosaic of Thought: The Power of Comprehension Strategy Instruction (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality:A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London: Routledge. Kumpulainen, K., & Wray, D. (2002). Classroom Interaction and Social Learning. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Leander, K., & Boldt, G. (2013). Rereading “A pedagogy of multiliteracies”: Bodies, texts, and emergence. Journal of Literacy Research, 45(1), 22–46. Lipman, M. (2003). Thinking in Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maine, F. (2014).‘I wonder if they are going up or down’: Children’s co-constructive talk across the primary years. Education 3-13: International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early Years Education, 42(3), 298–312. Maine, F. (2015). Dialogic Readers: Children Talking and Thinking Together About Visual Texts. London: Routledge. Maine, F. (2017a). The bothersome crow people and the silent princess: Exploring the orientations of children as they play a digital narrative game. Literacy. Maine, F. (2017b). Collaborative and dialogic meaning-making: How children engage and immerse in the storyworld of a mobile game. In C. Burnett, G. Merchant, A. Simpson & M. Walsh (Eds.), The Case of the iPad: Mobile Literacies in Education. Singapore: Springer. Marsh, J., & Millard, E. (2000). Literacy and Popular Culture. London: Paul Chapman. Mercer, N. (2004). Sociocultural discourse analysis: Analysing classroom talk as a social mode of thinking. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 137–168. Mercer, N., & Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking: A Sociocultural Approach. London: Routledge. Mercer, N.,Wegerif, R., & Dawes, L. (1999). Children’s talk and the development of reasoning in the classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 25(1), 95–111. Mukerjee, S. (2015). Video Games and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Murphy, P. K., Wilkinson, I. A. G., Soter, A. O., Hennessy, M. N., & Alexander, J. F. (2009). Examining the effects of classroom discussion on students’ comprehension of text: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(3), 740–764. Nystrand, M. with Gamoran, A., Kachur, R., & Prendergast, C. (1997). Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom. London: Teachers College Press. Palincsar, A. S., & Brown, A. L. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1(2), 117–175. Paul, R. W. (1987). Dialogical thinking: Critical thought essential to the acquisition of rational knowledge and passions. In J. B. Baron & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), Teaching Thinking Skills: Theory and Practice. New York: Fireman and Co. Pearson, P. D. (2009). The roots of reading comprehension instruction. In G. Duffy & S Israel (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Reading Comprehension (pp. 3–31). London: Routledge. Pressley, M., & Allington, R. (2015). Reading Instruction that Works: The Case for Balanced Teaching (4th ed.). New York and London: Guilford Press. Rosenblatt, L. M. (1994). The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Rowsell, J. (2012). Working with Multimodality. London: Routledge. Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2003). Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. SAPERE. (2019). https://www.sapere.org.uk Sipe, L. R. (2008). Storytime: Young Children’s Literary Understanding in the Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. Snow, C. (2002). Reading for Understanding: Toward an R+D Program in Reading Comprehension. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Retrieved from http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_ reports/2005/MR1465.pdf

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Reading as a transaction of meaning making Soter, A. O., Wilkinson, I. A., Murphy, P. K., Rudge, L., Reninger, K., & Edwards, M. (2008). What the discourse tells us: Talk and indicators of high-level comprehension. International Journal of Educational Research, 47(6), 372–391. Soter, A.,Wilkinson, I., Connors, S., Murphy, K., & Shen,V. F.Y. (2010). Deconstructing “aesthetic response” in small-group discussions about literature: A possible solution to the “aesthetic response” dilemma. English Education, 42(2), 204–225. Street, B. (1984). Literacy in Theory and Practice (Vol. 9). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ustwogames. (2014). Monument Valley: An iOS and Android Game by ustwo. Available at http://monumentvalleygame.com (accessed 20th September 2018) Waterhouse, J. (1888). The Lady of Shalott. London: The Tate Gallery. Wegerif, R. (2005). Reason and creativity in classroom dialogues. Language and Education, 19(3), 223–237. Wegerif, R. (2008). Dialogic or dialectic? The significance of ontological assumptions in research on educational dialogue. British Educational Research Journal, 34(3), 347–361. Wilkinson, I., Murphy, K., & Binici, S. (2015). Dialogue intensive pedagogies for promoting reading comprehension what we know what we need to know, In L. Resnick, C. Asterhan & S. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 37–50). Washington, DC: AERA. Wohlwend, K. E. (2015). One screen, many fingers:Young children’s collaborative literacy play with digital puppetry apps and touchscreen technologies. Digital Media and Literacies Special Issue. Theory into Practice, 54, 154–162. Wolf, M. K., Crosson, A. C., & Resnick, L. B. (2006). Accountable Talk in Reading Comprehension Instruction. CSE Technical Report 670. National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST). Retrieved from http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED492865

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24 RESEARCH ON DIALOGIC LITERARY GATHERINGS Marta Soler-Gallart

Introduction Educational researchers have been devoted to the study of the quality of dialogue in teaching and learning to improve not only academic achievement but also to foster social competences and democratic values. The chapters in this volume and the evidence provided, among a wide array of research in the field, justify this claim. Society has become increasingly dialogic, in which dialogism, defined as social interaction, intrinsically defines human nature (Freire, 1997). Language plays a crucial role in human existence for its capacity to enable us to share thoughts and organize our social life (Mercer, 2000, 2013). Therefore, in a dialogic society people’s dialogues are key in shaping social actions and structures towards democracy. Dialogic Literary Gatherings (DLGs) exemplify how dialogue is put into practice in literacy learning to foster a transformation of the individual and collective experience of reading. Developed in Spain from the early 1980s with adult learners, DLGs have been replicated across educational stages and systems worldwide leading to academic and social improvements in many diverse contexts. This chapter reviews empirical research conducted on DLGs and on the different social impacts they have achieved on children and adults over the world. It first examines the dialogic approach to reading in education, turning from an individual process to a collective interpretation of the texts, and presents DLGs as an example of dialogic reading. Then, it presents the origins of DLGs and some of the distinctive characteristics that differentiate DLGs from other reading circles: only universal classics of literature are read, and the interactions that prevail in the gatherings are based on egalitarian dialogue. This is followed by a brief account about how DLGs work in diverse contexts and some of the impacts identified in research: improvement of children’s and their families’ literacy and communicative skills, development of children’s prosocial behaviour, and personal and social transformations. Finally, a brief account on the expansion and extension of the impact of DLGs to different contexts and countries is provided along with some final remarks.

Setting the scene DLG is a whole group educational and cultural activity involving the reading and discussion of classical literature among participants, including adults with non-academic backgrounds, 348

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c­ hildren and youth across the educational system and in other social institutions. Through classical works such as Homer’s The Odyssey or Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, individuals (children or adults) share knowledge and create and recreate culture and meaning on the basis of the principle of egalitarian dialogue, which underpins the functioning of DLGs. In egalitarian dialogues participants support their views with arguments and hold an attitude of openness to listening and discussing the text on the basis of the arguments provided by others. Each contribution and interpretation is considered in the dialogue regardless of the positions the speakers may have in the classroom (Habermas, 1984). Flecha’s theory of dialogic learning (Flecha, 2000) is at the core of the DLGs, facilitating a context of freedom and respect and reducing the hierarchical approaches to teaching and learning. In the DLGs all the participants democratically read the same text. All of them have voice to decide the book and for every meeting they agree the amount of reading to be discussed. They read before the gathering with a dialogic stance; they are reading to share a piece of the text with others in the next gathering. In the DLG, they take turns to share their own reflections based on those pieces that appeal to them for any reason. They reflect together around the section shared through exchanging different personal interpretations, which are always valued according to the arguments provided regardless of the social and academic status in the group. This has shifted the teacher–student talk in the classroom. Actually, the teacher becomes a facilitator who mainly takes the turns and provides a minimal scaffolding, promoting greater opportunities for children to engage in the talk. During the DLGs students sit in a circle; this creates a different atmosphere from the regular classroom. They create a special moment and space appropriate to share thoughts, reflections, and feelings. Everybody sits in the circle, including the teacher who reminds participants of the principles of the dialogic learning and the dynamic: everybody can share their ideas, referring to a concrete page in the book and sharing the reasons for selecting that idea. Most importantly, participants establish their interactions based on those principles so far. Throughout the more than 20 years that I have actively participated and observed the gatherings in different settings, the case has never been that one day occurs the same as previous experiences. Debates and children’s reflections always surprise those who come, visit, or participate time after time. The improvements DLGs foster have benefited children in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms who have been traditionally excluded from the academic discourse. In this context, I was particularly impressed when observing a Dialogic Literary Gathering about Romeo and Juliet among ten-year-old children. Hannan commented on the concept of “true love” as one of the ideas from the text that appealed to her. She explained the reason why she wanted to share that idea: “porque no es lo mismo que te guste alguien que el amor verdadero” [liking someone is not exactly the same as true love]. Her contribution prompted a discussion in the class about the meaning of true love. This allowed the children to go beyond Shakespeare’s words, as they connected with their own world, making meaning of their life experience while being listened to in a supportive environment. These conversations in the DLG, similar to other research on reading aloud and discussing books, have generated “opportunities for children to ask questions about what words mean, about how things work and about why people act the way they do” (Snow, 2017, p. 8). Certainly, reading the greatest literary works has widened the knowledge and language available to these children. Actually, improvements in vocabulary acquisition have been reported in primary classrooms and in children living in care when participating in DLGs (García-Carrión, 2015; Garcia Yeste, Gairal Casado, Munté Pascual, & Plaja Viñas, 2017; Hargreaves & García-Carrión, 2016). But the dialogic approach to reading and meaning-making of the classic texts in the DLGs is 349

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not only about getting more vocabulary input. In the DLGs children share special narratives to build knowledge and share feelings. In many episodes in the DLGs, children combine highly complex words with emotions prompted by the literary experience.

Towards a dialogic approach to reading Reading for yourself is different than reading to share. (Student participant in a DLG) A dialogic approach to reading is rooted in the socio-cultural theory grounded in Vygotsky’s works (Vygotsky, 1978, 1962). His central tenets have influenced debates in literacy research mainly because of the importance of language and the social nature of literacy learning and practice (Lee & Smagorinsky, 2000). The dialectic relation between the social and the individual mediated by cultural tools explains that learning occurs always first at the social level between people (interpsychological plane) and then at the individual level (intrapsychological plane). Considered the “tool of the tools”, language plays a crucial role in the process of transforming external activity into the internal one, what he acknowledged as internalization (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 57). As several authors have stated (Bakhtin & Holquist, 1981; Mead, 1934; Vygotsky, 1978), language and the human condition are dialogic in nature. Language and literacy development have an inextricable relationship with children’s social and cultural worlds (Purcell‐Gates, Melzi, Najafi, & Orellana, 2011). It is only in a cultural context that we use language to understand other peoples’ minds (Bruner, 1996). In other words, language makes intersubjectivity possible. Understanding intersubjectivity as a critical dimension of the dialogic approach to reading enables us to situate the reading experience in a collective context beyond an individual reader interacting with the text. Most of the literature framed in reader-response theory contends that meaning-making emerges as a result of a transaction between a text and a reader, which results in an individual process (Iser, 1978; Rosenblatt, 1994). However, within the frame of these reading theories there is no space for including interactions among people to make meaning collectively. Bakhtin (1981) challenged the monologic way of interpreting text and argued for the dialogic experience of human beings making meaning with others. His dialogism (1981) is fundamental in the dialogic turn of literacy studies based on the idea that “the utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication and cannot be broken off from the preceding links that determine it” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 94) Therefore, far from being monologic, interpretation is the result of a dialogic chain, because in any utterance there is always more than one voice speaking. It is because of the “multivoicedness” in the reading process that dialogic reading seeks to involve more, and more diverse, people in reading events to create a collective interpretation of the text. Dialogic reading involves listening to others, respecting everyone’s turn to speak and their interpretation, aiding the better knowledge of others and improving social relations. Language and learning gains of dialogic reading have also been proved when students speak about what they read and what they see and especially when they receive feedback on their readings and thoughts (Valdez-Menchaca & Whitehurst, 1992). A dialogic perspective on reading has deeply explored the use of language in co-constructing knowledge and making meaning when children talk and think together about visual texts (Maine, 2015). In dialogic transactions established between the text and the readers children show critical and creative responses to the text, becoming “dialogic readers” (see Maine, Chapter 23 in this volume). 350

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Given the learning and social benefits, dialogic reading approaches become a venue to tackle low levels of reading skills and problems of reading comprehension, taking into account the increasingly complex comprehension skills that students need to develop to progress through school (Goldman, 2012). Particularly, the question of how classroom discourse may enhance reading comprehension has been addressed by developing specific discussion-oriented pedagogical strategies (Soter et al., 2008). Similarities and differences among those discussion approaches are also addressed in this volume (see Wilkinson, Soter, Murphy & Lightner, Chapter 22). Similarly, in dialogic reading, through question-and-answer sequences among children, teachers, and other participant adults, learning is indeed reinforced to deepen comprehension and meaning-making (Wells, 1999). Doyle and Bramwell (2006) describe dialogic reading according to the pedagogy of question perspective, where adolescents are asked to provide answers while they are reading. In this process, diverse views on the texts arise, and this contributes to giving new and creative meanings to the reading materials. Becoming a dialogic reader (Maine, 2015) thus means more than just reading in depth with a critical eye, deeply understanding the text, or bringing one’s life to the text. It also means establishing a dialogic relationship with other readers as the means to achieve these reading outcomes. Dialogic readers interpret and critically reflect on the book with other participants’ thoughts and interpretations. In this dialogic process, literacy becomes emancipatory (Freire & Macedo, 2005) as it enables learners to recognize and understand their voices in multiples discourses, developing competency and valuing their own discourses simultaneously. The shared reading experience unveils readers’ epistemological curiosity and eagerness to know more about literature, culture, and society. Thus, a range of dimensions deriving from dialogic reading reach beyond the reading event itself.

Dialogic reading in the literary gatherings I argue dialogic reading is an intersubjective experience, grounded in egalitarian dialogue and solidarity, in which the interaction between the reader, the text, and other readers or other people becomes the interpretative experience. Dialogic reading focuses on reading comprehension and engagement with the text, while it also holds an agenda of social transformation (Soler, 2004). Building on Flecha’s theory of dialogic learning (Flecha, 2000), which is at the theoretical basis underlying the Dialogic Literary Gatherings, I studied the very reading process and identified three stages organized in a circular way that epitomizes the movement from the subjective experience to the intersubjective and collective interpretation of the text. This construct of dialogic reading is put into practice in the DLG: first, participants have a subjective reading of the text, making connections with their social, cultural, and personal experiences, but there is the intention to share with others; second, they meet and share those reflections about the reading that have been meaningful for them. Intersubjectivity is essential to reach a collective interpretation of text. Third, they take the chain of dialogues generated in the process and the critical reading of the world with them out of the school walls.The implications of this process indicate that readers rethink and recreate knowledge and everyday lives; hence every new dialogue offers new opportunities for learning and transformation (see Figure 24.1). The DLG is one of those dialogic learning environments implemented in schools over the world (European and Latin American countries) where students’ use of their own life experiences to interpret passages of the classical literature is promoted and which has been evidenced to raise the achievement in language and literacy of students in diverse socio-economic contexts. Dialogue is the basis of the functioning and the learning process that take place in the 351

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Social, cultural and personal experiences of the reader

Dialogic stance of the subjective experience with text Dialogic re-interpretation beyond the gathering

Intersubjective reflection and collective interpretation

Figure 24.1 Process of dialogic reading, adpated from Soler (2004).

DLG. This learning process is a circular one, which keeps increasing and transforming, from the lifeworld to the DLG and from the DLG to the community and beyond.

Dialogic Literary Gatherings: tearing down elitist walls We, the people, understand everything, and the better written the better we understand. (Adult participant in a DLG) DLGs started in Barcelona in the 1980s, after more than 40 years of Franco’s dictatorship.The growth of civil moments after the death of Franco in 1975 contributed to creating a context in which there was a mobilization for universal access to culture and education led by disadvantaged social groups (see Flecha, 2000, for the beginning of DLGs). The political transition to democracy at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s was accompanied by the claims to advance toward a free and democratic education. Critical educators were inspired by the intellectual debates and educational experiences of the popular athenaeums in the 19th century and recovered those alternatives with the aim of extending a general education for all (Flecha, 2000). They merged these popular education experiences and libertarian ideals with the dialogic pedagogy developed by Freire in the cultural circles (Freire, 2004), which were also having a great impact in Spanish adult education in the late 1970s. In this context, the first DLG started in La Verneda-Sant Martí, an adult school in a working-class neighborhood of Barcelona, which has become an international reference because of its contributions to the transformative movement in democratic education (Aubert, Villarejo, Cabre, & Santos, 2016). Reading the greatest literary works of literature has been fundamental for the participants to improve literacy learning and to engage in social and personal transformations. A longitudinal study followed the trajectories of four women, who participated in the DLG for more than 20 years (between 25 to 32) (Yeste et al., 2017). There, women in their 70s and 80s, with no academic background, who learnt to read and write as adults, reported the books they read in the gatherings, which included Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Tagore’s The Gardener, Nana by Emile Zola, Cervantes’ Novelas Ejemplares, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard, Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde, Zola’s Germinal, George Orwell’s 1984,Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves, and James Joyce’s Dubliners. Through the dialogues in the DLGs they accessed these books when making meaning together

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with others in an egalitarian space. As a result, they reported becoming confident readers and perceiving themselves as culturally competent. I have participated in the gatherings for 30 years. I have read all, all the books! When my daughter was 15, she was proud that I was reading these books. And now I have a grandson, and whenever we call each other he asks me, ‘Grandma, what are you reading now’? And I told him, ‘That one. Try to read it some day!’ (Yeste et al., 2017, p. 193) The value of the classic texts and its benefits for the participants in the DLGs is consistent with other research that has also explored the impact of reading classical literature. For example, Keidel, Davis, Gonzalez-Diaz, Martin, & Thierry (2013) used functional magnetic resonance imaging to analyse how reading Shakespeare’s works affects brain activation on the reader. The participants of the study were given 36 sentences selected by the authors from Shakespeare’s plays which contained functional shift (a rhetorical device that changes the grammatical status of words) and their corresponding non-shifted sentences and found that those sentences with functional shift significantly activated a great number of regions in the brain beyond those activated by typical language. Nevertheless, the sample can be considered too small (17 participants) to determine the increases in brain activity by reading Shakespeare in a wider and more diverse population. Another study in this field found that people who read classical literature have the theory of the mind, that is, the capacity to read other people’s minds and emotions, more developed than people who do not (Kidd & Castano, 2013). However, the study was based on a series of experiments with a small sample, which make results difficult to generalize to a wider population. When exploring research on literary studies, reading The Arabian Nights during childhood had an impact on children who later became highly acknowledged writers in English literature, such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and Robert Louis Stevenson (Styles, 2010). Departing from a theoretical standpoint that readers make meaning of the text and that there is not one single interpretation, Styles (2010) argues that literacy practices with children are too much focused on mechanics of reading instead of encouraging children to enjoy reading by engaging with the text and making meaning of it (Iser, 1978; Rosenblatt, 1994). Although in DLGs children do not read the original classics, they read high-quality age-appropriate adaptations which do not use childish language and stay faithful to the originals’ main themes. Children therefore have the opportunity to discuss and become familiar with the great themes of humankind and being socialized in these stories might motivate them to read the originals in the future. The context of DLGs creates affordances to make meaning of the classic texts in a dialogic space (Wegerif, 2011).The communicative action that occurs among participants in the DLGs must include validity claims and it must be oriented towards reaching understanding among all the participants in the dialogue (Habermas, 1984). These theoretical contributions underlie the principle of egalitarian dialogue. According to Flecha: “Dialogue is egalitarian when it takes different contributions into consideration according to the validity of their reasoning, instead of according to the positions of power held by those who make the contributions” (Flecha, 2000, p. 2). Research on pragmatics has shown DLGs create a dialogic space that involves certain implications in the interactional behaviour of the participants (Llopis, Villarejo, Soler, & Alvarez, 2016). Through the identification of dialogic and power interactions related to DLGs, it is

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demonstrated that the use of polite mitigation strategies contributes to an egalitarian dialogue regardless of the positions of the participants in DLGs. Moreover, there is evidence that in DLGs the interactive interpretation of texts favours the value of each of the contributions, as there is no right or wrong expert interpretation (Llopis et al., 2016). This openness raises a challenge for teachers’ pedagogical objectives in the DLGs. Since children are encouraged to freely make meaning of the texts by drawing on their own experiences and funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992), misconceptions or children not being accountable to the text can arise. In these situations, teachers tend to provide an optimal scaffolding building on children’s contributions and follow a comprehension-as-sensemaking approach (Aukerman, 2013). Nevertheless, this is not always a straightforward process, and it might be challenging for the teachers to guide students without restraining to the comprehension-as-outcome approach (Aukerman, 2013).Teachers rely on the principle of egalitarian dialogue which expects children to be accountable to others and to the text based on providing reasoning arguments grounded on validity claims (Habermas, 1984).

Impact on learning: insights from a decade of research Evidence of the improvements achieved in schools and communities implementing DLGs, among other educational actions, informed European policy recommendations (Flecha, 2015) that have contributed to guiding real classroom practices in schools across Europe and Latin America. A brief account of the impact reported by more than a decade of research is discussed as follows.

Improvements in children and families’ literacy and communicative skills Longitudinal studies carried out within the INCLUD-ED project show the improvements in children and families’ literacy skills and social inclusion in marginalized settings (de Botton, Girbés, Ruiz, & Tellado, 2014; García-Carrión, Girbés-Peco, & Gómez-Zepeda, 2015). Schools located in poor neighbourhoods in Spain have shown the potential of implementing DLGs with elementary students and their families. After five years of implementing DLGs, students achieving higher in 4th grade raised from 17% to 85% (Flecha, 2015; García-Carrión et al., 2015). For the same period, classrooms became culturally and linguistically diverse, increasing the number of immigrant students from 12% to 46%.Whereas increasing diversity in the classroom could be understood as problematic for literacy learning, implementing DLGs creates more opportunities for children to engage in dialogic interactions. Putting egalitarian dialogue into work enables equitable participation in the classroom. This has been documented by the research conducted in England where four primary schools implemented DLGs as part of the ChiPE project (Hargreaves & García-Carrión, 2016). ChiPE’s main aim was to examine how a dialogic learning environment creates an inclusive “epistemic climate” (Feucht, 2010) that includes those who are excluded from the academic discourse. Main findings reported a shift in the teacher–student talk ratio where over 75% of the class joins the dialogue, contributing over 80% of the talk, often in extended utterances which reveal reasoning and speculation (Hargreaves & García-Carrión, 2016). The analysis of 38 minutes of Year 6 pupils, discussing an age-appropriate version of The Odyssey, showed “evidence of the children reasoning as they talk in changing minds, hypothesizing; posing questions; explicit statements of agreement and building on each other’s ideas” (Hargreaves & García-Carrión, 2016). These analyses also showed that those children who traditionally do not participate in the conversa-

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tion began to contribute, but also, those who usually speak were largely engaged and listening actively (Hargreaves & García-Carrión, 2016). It has also been found that the impact of the DLGs does not stay in the schools but is transferred to the children’s homes, generating improvements in their families. One of the case studies analysed in the framework of the INCLUD-ED project was an urban primary school in Catalonia (Spain) located in a low socioeconomic status (SES) neighbourhood with more than 80% students belonging to minority groups, mostly migrants from Morocco. Many of their parents have no basic education, and some have not finished primary school. The analysis found that the school’s DLGs in which some Moroccan mothers participated had several impacts on their households due to the new educational expectations that arose, such as contributing to transforming child–parent interactions, engaging in dialogues about the books they read in the gatherings, increasing the number and kind of academic interactions at home. Both children’s and parents’ motivation to read have also increased. Moreover, participating in the DLGs helped improve the migrant mothers’ Spanish language skills and they could therefore understand better their children’s schoolwork, enabling them to help them with their homework.

Improving prosocial behavior Research has also found that the impact of DLGs on children goes beyond academic achievements, with evidence on the development of children’s prosocial behaviour and improvements in coexistence in their school and community contexts. The first quasi-experimental study on DLGs, consistent with previous research on DLGs, was recently published (Villardón-Gallego, García-Carrión, Yáñez-Marquina, & Estévez, 2018). Its results broaden the improvements achieved by DLGs, which go further than improvements in children’s literacy and communicative skills. The study, which was conducted in 4 Spanish elementary schools involving 228 children, revealed that after 10 weekly sessions of DLGs, students in the experimental groups developed prosocial behaviours, with especial improvements of solidarity and friendship, whereas students in the control groups, who had not participated in the DLGs, decreased or maintained such behaviours during the same time period.

Transforming biographies Importantly, research has found evidence of the impact that DLGs have in transforming the lives of the participants, as well as their social contexts. Biographical research conducted with diverse unprivileged people, from children to adults, reported the transformations experienced by the participants, both in their personal lives and in their communities (Soler, 2015). Among the 16 biographies carefully examined and portrayed in a Special Issue published in Qualitative Inquiry in 2015, the case of Amaya, a 12-year-old Roma girl, arises the issue of bullying in elementary classrooms and the role that DLGs might have in addressing this challenge (Aubert, 2015). The exclusion she was suffering changed when she started participating in the DLGs and started enjoying stories such as Romeo and Juliet. When her classmates saw her enjoy that much and participate in the gatherings, their perception of her changed, as well as her own perception of herself and her learning abilities (her reading and speaking skills improved), which sparked her dream to become a doctor. Another example of transformation is the one of Alba, an 11-yearold immigrant who had learning and communicative difficulties and a learning level three or four years below what is expected for her age (Molina, 2015). Alba could not read when she first participated in the DLGs at the age of seven, so she did not make any contributions;

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however, her desire to participate motivated her to learn to read, and ever since she learned to read in the third year, she has been more and more motivated to keep learning, acquiring new vocabulary, and making brilliant contributions to creating profound debates from which her classmates also learn. Manuel’s biography is another of the many examples of transformation through DLGs (Pulido-Rodríguez, Amador, & Alonso, 2015). For this 75-year-old coming from a low academic background who had lost hope in social change after the bureaucratization of the Spanish transition from Franco’s dictatorship in the mid-1970s, the gatherings became a space in which he found the re-enchantment with democratic movements and the belief that transformation is possible.

Expanding and extending impact: what to do next? DLGs have been transferred to different schools as well as to some of the most vulnerable settings in society, with similar impacts to the ones achieved in educational contexts previously mentioned. In the last years, DLGs have been implemented in children’s residential care institutions (Garcia, Gairal Casado, Munté Pascual, & Plaja Viñas, 2017). Whereas data show that children in out-of-home care have more possibilities of suffering disadvantages in areas such as education or health, this study showed that, as these children read and reflected on classics such as Oliver Twist, they improved language and literacy skills, among others, vocabulary acquisition and oral expression. Moreover, DLGs influenced out-of-care children’s self-conceptions and feelings and created new meanings in their lives, such as an interest in learning. DLGs have also been successfully implemented in prisons (Alvarez, García-Carrión, Puigvert, Pulido, & Schubert, 2016). Data gathered in a longitudinal study from 2001 to 2012 in a prison showed that DLGs with inmates contributed to transforming participants in preparation for social reintegration, showing positive cognitive and social results. Interactions between inmates, workers, and teachers were transformed into more egalitarian and dialogic ones. Participants’ personal and family relationships also changed, and they experienced for the first time in prison a feeling of freedom which motivated them to keep fighting to improve their lives (Flecha García, García Carrión, & Gómez González, 2013). In other countries outside of Europe where hard work has been done to improve literacy for all children, DLGs have also been successfully replicated. In Latin America, there are over 2,000 DLGs in educational centres across Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Colombia, and Chile. The expansion of this educational action has also had an impact in the political sphere: two regions in Argentina (Salta and Santa Fe) and one in Mexico (Ciudad de Mexico) have turned them into educational policy, resulting in 850, 1,200, and 400 schools, respectively, which have implemented DLGs. All in all, the implementation of DLGs in diverse educational contexts shaped by different types of educational systems and the outstanding results in literacy and language skills achieved pose a great challenge for researchers. It is now our task to deepen the understanding of the underlying processes triggered by this practice (for instance at the cognitive, emotional, or neuronal level) and those conditions that can even enlarge the impact.

Final remarks DLGs seem likely to create the space for children to draw on their funds of knowledge from home and community (Mayall, 2010; Moll et al., 1992). Inspired by classic texts, they can contribute this knowledge while accessing high literary culture and link it with their own lives, ideas, and experiences. 356

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Dialogue and interaction play a critical role in the process of reading comprehension which simultaneously facilitates extracting and constructing meaning in an activity that involves written language (Snow, 2002). However, the impact of egalitarian dialogue-based shared response to texts in dialogic reading goes beyond technical reading comprehension.This chapter has discussed research on DLGs as a practice of dialogic reading that places egalitarian interactions on universal classics of literature as the basis of educational, personal, and social transformations around the world which have contributed to reducing inequalities and improving social cohesion. Reading practices in the last decades have evolved from a monologic process to a collective one, in which readers interpret the text together and make meaning in dialogue with each other (Bakhtin, 1981). Dialogic Literary Gatherings, an educational action that has achieved excellent results in schools across Europe and Latin America, have been studied in depth in order to analyse their social impact in all these schools. Children in different schools and countries and from diverse socio-economic contexts achieve similar results in developing language and literacy skills through participation in DLGs. When children read and interpret the classical texts collectively in an egalitarian dialogue, they bring into the interpretation their own life experiences and, at the same time, they take those dialogues and reflections on some of humankind’s deepest feelings, desires, and concerns into their own lives, generating transformations for them and their environments. Therefore, DLGs prove that anyone is capable of reading, understanding, and interpreting literature that used to be kept only for the elites. Such is the case of Hannan explained at the beginning of this chapter, who at the age of ten was already comparing the feeling of liking someone with that of true love. But Hannan is not the only example; children who participate in DLGs usually become engaged in this type of profound discourse, and arguments presented in the debates foster an elaborated language among them. Further research on the extent to which DLGs enhance the development of academic language should be undertaken. Replicating DLGs across contexts and countries allows researchers to explore new spaces in which this literacy practice can be developed. Expanding and extending the impact of DLGs to other contexts creates a language of possibility to understand others’ minds and hearts. Thus, dialogic approaches to literacy learning create affordances to learn words, values, and feelings that set up the basis for children and adults to engage in a process of personal and social transformation.

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25 WRITING TALK Developing metalinguistic understanding through dialogic teaching Debra Myhill and Ruth Newman

Introduction This chapter, nestled in the section on dialogic language and literacy education, focuses on writing – specifically on students’ thinking and linguistic decision-making in writing. It will bring together empirical and theoretical research on metalinguistic understanding and on dialogic teaching to develop an argument for the critical role of dialogic teaching in fostering the development and expansion of metalinguistic understanding about writing. In doing so, it will consider the limitations of binaries which position authoritative and dialogic talk as opposites and will offer a critical reframing of the role of teacher as expert in dialogic teaching. We will argue that dialogic teaching which effectively promotes metalinguistic understanding and the capacity to think metalinguistically requires teachers to orchestrate metalinguistic discussion in a way which draws on both teacher-as-expert and teacher-as-facilitator. In the context of metalinguistic discussion about writing, authoritative talk is not separate from dialogic talk but an integral part of cumulative episodes of the dialogic exploration of ideas. The chapter also addresses the significant gap in research on dialogic teaching specifically related to writing. The disciplinary field of research is principally in the context of mathematics (for example, Chapin and O’Connor 2012; Bakker, Smit, & Wegerif 2015; Kazak, Wegerif, & Fujita 2015) and science (for example, Scott, Mortimer, & Aguir 2006; Mercer, Dawes, & Kleine Staarman 2009; Bianchi and Booth 2014; Adey and Shayer 2015). Even within language and literacy education, research on dialogic teaching has looked principally at interactions with texts (Maine 2015; Wilkinson, Murphy, & Binici 2015) or general oracy and dialogue within the English classroom (Juzwik, Borsheim-Black, Caughlan, & Heintz 2013; Boyd and Markarian 2015). This gap is mirrored in research on metalinguistic understanding, which has tended to focus on second-language learning (e.g. Bialystok 2007; ter Kuile,Veldhuis, van Veen, & Wicherts 2011); early years language learners (Tunmer, Bowey, & Grieve 1983; Karmiloff Smith, Grant, Sims, Jones, & Cuckle 1996) and spelling (meta-phonological: Nunes, Bryant, & Bindman 2006; Bourassa, Treiman, & Kessler 2006 and meta-orthographical: Carovalas et al. 2005) and not on writing. Significantly, two recent randomised controlled trials on the impact of dialogic teaching on student attainment found, in one case, no effect on writing outcomes (Gorard, Siddiqui, & Huat See 2016) and in the other only tested for reading, not writing (Jay et al. 2017). At the same time, and of particular relevance to this chapter, Whitebread et al (2013; 2015) have drawn 360

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together the separate fields of dialogic teaching and self-regulation research to argue for the potential of dialogic talk to foster metacognitive thinking and self-regulatory processes. Our own research occupies a unique space in this landscape: we have undertaken a cumulative series of studies, investigating the inter-relationship of explicit teaching of grammar and its impact on writing attainment and metalinguistic understanding in writing (Myhill, Jones, Lines, & Watson 2012; Myhill and Newman 2016; Myhill, Jones, & Wilson 2016; Newman 2017). It is this body of work which drives the thinking in this chapter, drawing on the empirical evidence of how teachers have managed dialogic talk about writing and some of the challenges they have faced. Our theorisation of writing is interdisciplinary: historically, writing research has tended to be strongly located within disciplinary paradigms, particularly those of psychology, linguistics and socio-cultural theory, with relatively little theoretical or empirical integration between them. In effect, writing research is separated into what Juzwik et al. term as ‘different discourses’ characterised by the ‘coexistence of different epistemologies, problems, age levels, and methods’ (Juzwik et al. 2006:457) and an absence of inter-disciplinary conversations. We have sought to redress this separation by conceptualising writing, and thinking about writing, through an interdisciplinary lens with a tripartite focus on writing as an integrated process which combines the individual, the social and the textual. An attention to the individual takes account of cognitive models of writing (Flower and Hayes 1981; Bereiter and Scardamalia 1987; Berninger and Swanson 1994) which primarily consider the mental processes involved in creating a text and attend to the process of writing in terms of planning, generating and reviewing (Alamargot and Chanquoy 2001) and signal the importance of metacognition in writing (Hacker, Keener, & Kircher 2009). Of particular relevance to this chapter, cognitive psychology also frames writing as a problem-solving enterprise in which ‘all writers must make decisions about their texts’ (Kellogg 2008:2) – where multiple choices have to be made throughout the writing process about content, organisation and structure and expression. In contrast to the tendency of cognitive psychology to focus on the individual, the lone writer, socio-cultural perspectives position the writer within a community of practice (Haas Dyson 2003) and view writing as a social process, where individuals have to learn about the expectations of writing within different writing communities and different disciplinary discourses. Finally, linguistic understandings of writing spotlight the textual and are perhaps more concerned with writing as a product, than writing as a process, and illuminate for example, syntactical development in writing (Perera 1984) and how linguistic choices construct particular meanings in particular contexts (Halliday 1975). We are interested, then, in how teachers’ verbal classroom interactions with students about linguistic choices in writing (the social) support students’ metalinguistic decision-making (the individual) about their own writing (the textual).

Metacognition and metalinguistic understanding of writing Metacognition is an over-arching cognitive process which refers to the way in which we can have active control over our thinking processes, or put more simply, thinking about our thinking. Flavell described metacognition as ‘one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes’ (Flavell 1976:232) and argued that metacognition was composed of both knowledge of cognition and regulatory control of cognition. So metacognition is broadly defined as ‘any knowledge or cognitive activity that takes as its object, or regulates, any aspect of any cognitive enterprise’ (Flavell 1992:114). Cognitive research has repeatedly signalled the importance of metacognition in writing (Kellogg 1994; Berninger et al. 1994; Hacker et al. 2009) because the act of writing requires self-monitoring and management of the task. Writing also requires high-level metacognitive rhetorical 361

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p­ lanning (Hayes and Flower 1980), and through metacognition, covert processes can be made visible (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1982). Indeed there is a ‘close relationship between metacognition (in the form of metacognitive skills and metacognitive knowledge) and the development of compositional expertise’ (Alamargot and Fayol 2009:37). In particular, there is robust empirical evidence of the positive effect on writing outcomes of the training in self-regulation in writing (Graham and Perin 2007; Graham, Wilcox, & Early 2014). However, none of the research on metacognition and self-regulation in writing has attended to linguistic choice, and the text itself has seemed less significant than the process which generates it.Yet, as Gombert points out, writing requires ‘a higher level of abstraction and elaboration … metalinguistic development thus appears to be of primary importance in the acquisition of writing’ (Gombert 1992:151–152). He argues that metalinguistic understanding is commonly seen as a subset of ‘the general heading ‘metacognition’ concerned with language and its use’ (Gombert 1992:5) and in line with Flavell’s definition of metacognition involving both cognition and regulatory control, so Gombert conceptualises metalinguistic understanding as both reflecting on language in use and the ‘ability intentionally to monitor and plan their own methods of linguistic processing (in both comprehension and production)’ (Gombert 1992:13). Gombert also draws attention to the fact that metalinguistic understanding is interpreted differently in linguistics and psychology: in linguistics, it refers to language about language, whilst in psychology it refers to cognition about language (Gombert 1992:8). Our own research has examined whether explicit pedagogical attention to the grammar of written text can improve student outcomes in writing. This research has drawn on Halliday’s functional approach which positions grammar as social semiotic: it highlights the idea of grammar as ‘a resource for meaningmaking’, and that ‘text is a process of making meaning in context’ (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014:3). Halliday describes becoming a more proficient language user as a process of learning how to mean (Halliday 1975): arguably, a process in which metalinguistic understanding needs to be activated and in which dialogic teaching can be a powerful enabler. Thus, one aspect of accomplishment as a writer lies in the meaningful selection of grammatical structures to match the author’s intended communicative and rhetorical effect. In other words, writing is not a simple translation of words-in-the-head to words-on-the-page but a process of deliberate, conscious choice and control. Consider, for example, the different rhetorical effect of switching the adverbials from the front to the end of the two sentences in Table 25.1. The point is not that one sentence is better than the other but that the writer makes a linguistic choice, dependent upon his rhetorical intention – to foreground the image of the two eggs or to foreground the position of the eggs next to each other on the sand. Such choices are part of the repertoire of the accomplished writer, but our research has shown that developing writers need direct instruction to generate metalinguistic understanding of the effect of these linguistic choices (Myhill and Newman 2016). This links with Bereiter and Scardamalia’s (1986) analysis of children developing from a knowledge-teller, where the writing is an unshaped chain of ideas, to knowledge-transformer where there is ‘a mental dialogue between content and rhetoric’ (Sharples 1999:22).The teaching of writing, therefore, needs to ‘enable pupils to make choices from among a range of linguistic resources, and to be aware of the effects of different choices on the rhetorical power of their writing’ (Lefstein 2009:382). In other words, teaching needs to attend to students’ metalinguistic underTable 25.1 The rhetorical effect of moving adverbials in a sentence Sentence 1 Side by side on the sand sat two eggs. (opening sentence from Croc and Bird by Alexis Deacon) Sentence 2 Two eggs sat side by side on the sand.

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standing about writing, both in terms of thinking about writing and using language about writing. Such metalinguistic understanding fosters a sense of writing as design, in which writers are both creative thinkers and problem solvers (Sharples 1999:10). It is in this context that dialogic teaching offers possibilities for generating productive space for dialogic metalinguistic talk about writing and for forging a closer learning relationship between talking and writing.

Metatalk about writing Shanahan (2006) has drawn attention to the lack of empirical studies investigating the relationship between talking and writing, other than in early language development.Yet, there has long been advocacy of the value of talk in supporting writing development, frequently drawing on Britton’s assertion that ‘reading and writing float on a sea of talk’ (Britton 1983:11). This has, however, tended to be more attentive to talk for writing, the kind of talk that helps to generate ideas for writing, rather than to talk about writing which develops more specific understanding of the complex ways in which writing creates meanings. Uniquely, the concept of metatalk focuses upon this talk about writing. The term ‘metatalk’ derives from second-language learning (L2), and particularly from Swain’s (1995; 1998) coining of the word to describe metalinguistic reflection on language use. However, because of the nature of second-language learning, metatalk in L2 is more focused on the form of the target language and how it communicates: in other words, metatalk supports reflection on language as a system. In contrast, our appropriation of the term for first-language learners retains the idea of ‘language used for cognitive purposes’ (Swain 1998:69), generating a ‘deeper level of attention’ (Storch 2008:96) to the relationship between meaning, form and function, but is more concerned with understanding linguistic choices in writing as functionally oriented (Halliday 2004), rather than form-oriented. In other words, our interest is not in subject–verb agreement or management of tense, which are often key concerns for L2 learning; rather our interest is in supporting growing awareness of how linguistic choices subtly alter the way a text conveys its communicative message: a third person narrative, for example, establishes a different relationship with the reader than a first person narrative. Being able to recognise and discriminate between these choices is an important aspect of developing as a writer. Metatalk, then, is a specific kind of talk about writing with a focus on language use. It encourages the articulation of thinking about linguistic choices, some of which may be internalised or subconscious decision-making, but some of which represent new ways of knowing and understanding the relationship between a writer’s authorial intention, the linguistic choices which realise that intention and the intended effect on the reader. Metatalk involves both the individual’s thinking about writing and the shared understandings developed within the classroom as a writing community and is distinctively concerned with talk about linguistic choice. At the same time, metatalk, through enabling and encouraging this verbalisation of choice, is a pedagogical tool which allows teachers to determine the level of thinking and understanding that students have developed.

Verbalisation of metalinguistic understanding This verbalisation of choice is one very real benefit of metatalk: it is the means by which this metalinguistic understanding can be articulated, shared and examined. It is thus potentially a very powerful manifestation of learning talk.Verbalisation allows learners to make their thinking accessible for scrutiny and discussion and ‘helps learners to make explicit to themselves and others what they know, understand or can do’ (Edwards and Westgate 1994:6). At the same time, verbalisation brings new thought into consciousness: ‘it is through sharing and explaining our ideas that we bring 363

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our own thinking to conscious awareness’ (Larkin 2010:114). Thus metatalk creates possibilities for simultaneously ‘learning through language’ and ‘learning about language’ (Halliday 1993:112). However, there is conceptual disagreement in the metalinguistics field regarding verbalised metalinguistic understanding, a disagreement linked to implicit and explicit knowledge (for a fuller discussion, see Myhill and Jones 2015). On the one hand, some like Roehr (2008) argue that metalinguistic understanding is declarative and therefore must be accessible ‘for verbal report’ (Roehr 2008:179). In contrast, others (e.g. Camps and Milian 1999) distinguish between verbalisable and non-verbalisable understanding, seeing the latter as active procedural knowledge which can be used in writing but which the learner cannot explain in words. Non-verbalisable metalinguistic understanding, thus defined, would be deemed epilinguistic, or implicit, by many such as Gombert (1992). Whilst this may seem a purely theoretical debate, it has relevance for this chapter and for thinking about the role of dialogic talk in supporting learning about writing. The distinction may be less to do with procedural/declarative or implicit/explicit binaries and more to do with the relationship between language and thought and how to put into words thinking which is only partially formed. In Australia, working with Australian primary children, Chen and Jones (2012) found that there were students who know, consciously, what they are doing but struggle to articulate it. Similarly, in our own research, we have regularly encountered learners who seemed to be trying to explain something but not quite finding the right words. In the example the follows, 13-year-old Lucy is talking about a peer’s writing in a research interview and struggling to explain her point: Lucy:

The second one – it’s like saying what happens and then just like stops a bit and then just goes on and it’s just like stoppy starty a bit. Interviewer: Right can you tell me what you mean? So what do you mean by, what stops and what starts? Lucy: Like, erm, it’s saying like ‘suddenly my goggles were hit with a ball of ice’ and then it likes carries on – it says ‘unexpectedly my board fell away from me’. It’s just like he could have gone into detail about what happened, like did his goggles fall off or something or other, but it just starts and stops, so it does that. Thus one important aspect of metatalk may lie in its encouragement of the verbalisation of partially grasped ideas which ‘raises consciousness about patterns of language’ (Schleppegrell 2013:168). Such verbalisation may enhance students’ capacity to think metalinguistically about writing and not only develop knowledge about linguistic choices, but through this, it may enable greater, more agentic control of linguistic choices and, crucially, a transfer of verbalised metalinguistic understanding into writing outcomes.

Dialogic teaching Our concern, then, is with how metatalk about writing can support the development of metalinguistic understanding about linguistic choices in written text and through that enable greater independence and effectiveness in decision-making as a writer. In other words, we are interested not so much in the general improvement of thinking skills to enhance academic attainment but specifically in improvement of writing competence. Although dialogic talk is variously described as exploratory talk (Barnes 2010; Mercer 2000; Gillies 2016); dialogic talk (Michaels and O’Connor 2007; Alexander 2008; Wegerif 2011; Reznitskaya et al. 2009); and accountable talk (Resnick, Asterhan, & Clarke 2015), our precise interest is in dialogic teaching and how the teacher orchestrates metalinguistic discussion about writing. Central to this 364

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g­ eneral body of research on dialogic, exploratory or accountable talk is an emphasis on breaking away from teacher-dominated classroom talk, characterised by passive learning and transmission of knowledge, to more actively constructed knowledge. As Resnick et al. describe it, ‘we can use the opportunity of classroom talk to teach students to think—to make knowledge’ (Resnick et al. 2015). Sociocultural studies into dialogic talk, such as those by Mercer and Littleton (2007) and Alexander (2018), emphasise not only the relationship between talking and thinking but also the skill of the teacher in managing classroom talk to enable learning to occur. As Alexander argues although student talk must be our ultimate preoccupation because of its role in the shaping of thinking, learning and understanding, it is largely through the teacher’s talk that the student’s talk is facilitated, mediated, probed and extended – or not, as the case may be. (2018:3) One short-coming in empirical research investigating teachers’ management of talk is perhaps an over-focus on the more surface features of dialogic classroom discourse, particularly on the classification of questions, on triadic discourse patterns and on length of student responses. Boyd and Markarian (2015) note that the focus on open questions, for example, can emphasise the form of the question, rather than the function, and the nature of the interaction sequence which follows. Instead, their interest is in dialogic stance and ‘how patterns of talk may open up discourse space for exploration and varied opinions’ (Boyd and Markarian 2015:273). It is in this discourse space, or dialogic space (Wegerif 2013), that possibilities for nurturing metalinguistic understanding are made real. Whilst there is much value in researching and theorising the interpersonal interactions in dialogic teaching, including the nature of collaborative talk, and the ways in which peers interact and negotiate discourse roles, our own specific concern is with the cognitive, linguistic and socio-cultural learning that can inhabit dialogic space. In Alexander’s terms, we are fundamentally interested in cumulative talk, where students build on each other’s contributions and create chains of coherent thinking and understanding, and purposeful talk, which is both open and dialogic and is structured with clear learning goals in mind (Alexander 2008). Our own research has shown that teachers are not always successful in managing this kind of talk (Myhill and Newman 2016; Myhill et al. 2016) and like Alexander (2017a:49–53), we have found that teachers are not always secure in navigating the negotiation of meaning in cumulative talk. In light of this, Boyd and Markarian’s (2015:275) synthesis of research offers a helpful way to structure thinking about dialogic metalinguistic talk. They bring together the ideational, ‘cognitive activity for personal understanding and building knowledge’, the epistemic, which shapes ‘the speaker’s own perception of the world and represents it as knowledge’, and the cumulative, where talk builds ‘coherent lines of thinking and inquiry’.

Dialogic metatalk for learning about writing The epistemic is an important aspect in considering dialogic metatalk about writing. The act of writing is cognitively highly complex – indeed Kellogg compares it to the demands of playing chess (Kellogg 2008) – and unlike many other aspects of learning, the cognitive demands of writing do not decrease with expertise. Instead, they increase. This is in part due to the challenges of managing an increasingly sophisticated linguistic repertoire at lexical, syntactical and textual levels, and in part due to writers’ socio-cultural awareness of readership, context and their own authorial intention intensifying with maturation. In other words, the more expert we become as writers, the greater our epistemic awareness of what writing can be and the greater the potential gap between our goals and the unfolding text on the page. 365

Debra Myhill and Ruth Newman Table 25.2 Adapted from Halliday (1993:111) Spoken form

Written form

whenever an engine fails because they can move very fast happens if people smoke more

in times of engine failure rely on their great speed is caused by increased smoking

Not only that, but writing as a language competency is not naturally learned through social interaction in the way that talk is learned. Developing writers have to learn to discriminate between the linguistic characteristics of speech and writing, most notably the management of the sentence, which is not a linguistic unit in speech but is central to writing, and the sociocultural expectations of different kinds of writing, such as managing formality and informality in workplace writing. Halliday (1993) notes the centrality of grammatical form in shaping these distinctions and gives the example of the strong tendency in English to nominalise in writing where verbs and adjectives would be used in speech (see Table 25.2). Halliday argues that this nominalisation, or grammatical metaphor, transforms the dynamic aspect of speech which constructs reality as process into a synoptic aspect where reality is object and where nouns are privileged over verbs and adjectives. Epistemically, this requires ‘a reconstrual of experience, in which reality comes to consist of things rather than doing and happening’ (Halliday 1993:111). This is only one example amongst many of the subtleties of linguistic difference between speech and writing. However, it is not just the differences between speech and writing which make epistemic demands. Even within the framework of the conventions of genres, there is significant scope for linguistic decision-making, and each decision differently shapes the way the text negotiates its communication with the reader and the meanings it conveys. Recipes are an example of a genre where the prototypical genre characteristics are relatively stable: such as the use of imperative verbs, the use of adjectives for specification, the strong importance of clause sequencing and chronology. Yet an examination of recipes written by Mrs Beeton, Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver reveals how linguistic choices establish very different reader relationships. Mrs Beeton, talking to married woman whose marital duty was to provide good food for the family, makes heavy use of the imperative and has a bare text with no direct acknowledgement of the reader. Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver, writing for audiences who choose to cook, make greater use of the second person pronoun ‘you’ to build a reader relationship rather than the imperative; they make greater use of modality (could; should; might; possibly, etc.) to give the reader choices; they use persuasive language to convince the reader of the merits of the recipe, and Jamie Oliver uses colloquial lexis (lob; chuck; damned good) to achieve greater informality.These subtle shifts in linguistic choices are responses to the socio-cultural contexts in which these texts are written and reflect both diachronic changes in socio-cultural expectations (over time), as is the case with Mrs Beeton, but also synchronic differences across different writing communities, as with Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver. In the light of this, metatalk about writing generates a pedagogical means for fostering the metalinguistic understanding of these complex linguistic scenarios in written text. But it is important not to underestimate the challenge of this kind of talk, which neither deals with facts nor opinions, but with conceptual abstract ideas, for which learners have little experience to draw on. Whilst reading may act as a model for writing and for some learners develops tacit linguistic knowledge which is used in writing, it does not develop metalinguistic understand366

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ing which can be verbalised and explored. And many students required to write as part of the school curriculum are not keen readers and may not read the kinds of texts that might suffice as models. So metatalk needs to be ‘consciousness-raising’ (Schleppegrell 2013:154). Sfard (2015) talks of ‘meta-level learning’, giving the example of children’s learning of numbers where initially numbers are linked to their everyday experiences (2 shoes; 3 sisters; 50 pence, etc.). But when negative numbers are introduced, meta-level learning is needed as the mathematics has ‘stopped being a story of an external world’ (Sfard 2015:251). The same distinction is true in learning about writing: everyday language experiences may support the communication of ideas in writing, but metalinguistic understanding is meta-level learning. Sfard argues that collaborative talk may support the former but that meta-level change needs more direct involvement of the teacher: thus, in the context of metalinguistic understanding, dialogic teaching needs to be adaptive to the need for this meta-level change. It is here that the notion of dialogic space, ‘the space of possibilities that opens up in dialogue’ (Wegerif 2013:62), has particular saliency. Wegerif maintains that pedagogically we could helpfully ‘talk about “opening dialogic space”, through interrupting an activity with a reflective question, for example or “widening dialogic space” through bringing in new voices or “deepening dialogic space” through reflection on assumptions’ (Wegerif 2013:32). Dialogic teaching which creates this dialogic space fosters metatalk through creating opportunities for the verbalisation, discussion and justification of linguistic choices in writing and supports meta-level change. Such teaching also integrates the dialogical problem spaces of what to say and how to say it (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1987) as complementary, rather than binary spaces of learning (Myhill et al. 2016).

Teacher as expert Thus far, we have outlined the critical role of dialogic teaching in fostering the development and expansion of metalinguistic understanding about writing and have framed this through the concept of metatalk. In this final section, our concern shifts to the role of teacher in managing dialogic metatalk about the relationship between linguistic choice and rhetorical effect in writing: a situation where although there is no single right answer, neither is it a totally open discussion but one shaped by the interplay of socially determined expectations of text and the individual’s authorial intention. The role of the teacher as expert is important in creating dialogic space for metalinguistic talk about choice within the parameters of freedom and compliance in which all writing is situated. There has been a tendency in the research on dialogic teaching to position dialogic and monologic teaching as binaries (for example, Edwards and Westgate 1994; Skidmore 2002; Alexander 2008), where dialogic teaching is valorised as ‘better’ learning talk than the tightly controlled, teacher-dominated triadic discourse characteristic of monologic teaching. Arguably, what this research is highlighting is the limitation of monologic discourses which privilege the teacher’s voice, which see knowledge as transmissional and which give learners little voice in the construction of knowledge. Some recent research, however, has begun to challenge the absoluteness of this binary ‘where direct instruction or unidirectional transmission of knowledge is often pitted against open-ended, student-centred inquiry’ (O’Connor and Michaels 2007:276) and to acknowledge the role of both the monologic and the dialogic in classroom discourse (Scott et al. 2006; Wells 2006). In particular, this recognises the place for the teacher’s authoritative knowledge, not as transmission, but as a way of shaping the purposefulness of the discussion. Nonetheless, this continues to sustain a counterpointing of authoritative knowledge against open-ended exploration and does not fully engage with the place of expertise and expert knowledge within dialogic discourse. If, as Alexander argues, ‘it is largely through the teacher’s talk that the student’s talk 367

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is facilitated, mediated, probed and extended’ (2018:3), the teacher’s expert knowledge is critical in effective facilitation, mediation and extension of learning. In the case of metatalk about linguistic choice in writing, our own research (Myhill, Jones, & Watson 2013) has shown that teachers’ own grammatical knowledge and their capacity to notice and interpret linguistic choices in written texts is of paramount importance in enabling classroom dialogue to probe and extend students’ thinking. This plays out in talk sequences in terms of teacher correction of a grammatical misunderstanding (for example, talking about a noun phrase when the example is a full sentence), but more significantly, it plays out in questions which reveal the teacher’s expert knowledge and support a guided discussion. Alexander (2017) has argued that of his five principles of dialogic talk, cumulative talk is the most challenging because it ‘attends to its meaning and, therefore, simultaneously tests teachers’ mastery of the epistemological terrain being explored, their insight into students’ understandings within that terrain, and their interactive skill in taking those understandings forward’ (Alexander 2017a:49–53). In the example that follows, the teacher’s knowledge, that the position of the subject in a particular sentence is altering its emphasis, shapes the sequence. There is a right answer to her first question which is needed to create space for the second question, which is more open-ended, inviting student interpretation and explanation: Teacher: What is the subject of the sentence? Student: The sword Teacher: Why do you think he’s chosen to do it this way round? Why has he left the shining sword – the subject – until later in the sentence? Similarly, in the next example, the teacher is leading a discussion with ten-year-olds about how well-chosen description reveals the character, rather than simply telling the reader about them. The children are discussing the first time we meet the character of Guinevere in Morpurgo’s Arthur, High King of Britain. It is also the first time the character, Arthur, has seen Guinevere. The teacher asks the children what impression the description of Guinevere creates: Student: Guinevere’s pretty pretty Teacher: What do you mean by “pretty pretty”? Student: Because, like, where is it, they’re like describing her hair saying “honey and gold, washed in milk”, that sounds like she’s quite pretty. Teacher: OK, so the words that the writer is using then.What words can you pick out that suggest prettiness? Student: ‘Her hair was the colour of honey and gold washed in milk’ – She would be perfect – I think that might mean kind of like love Teacher: So you’re associating words like honey and gold with niceness, positive images? Student: She plays the harp but it’s nice, she looks like she’s doing it effortlessly and noone else can do it as good and it says effortlessly. Teacher: So what’s the word there that’s particularly helped you understand that person’s character? Student: ‘Effortlessly’ Teacher: Good. By using that word it helps you to understand that she’s very good at it. This may not seem like a standard dialogic sequence as there are moments where the teacher has a broad right answer in mind, particularly in relation to which words do the work of creating the character impression. But there are also moments where the teacher invites more open-ended elaboration and justification and where she picks up the student’s response and offers it back to 368

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them.The teacher-as-expert here has knowledge of how the text is working and a clear learning goal for this sequence. We would argue that this is not an interplay of authoritative and dialogic teaching but rather that the teacher-as-expert contributions are an integral part of the dialogic discussion itself. Sfard (2015) argues that to generate meta-level learning ‘the teacher’s telling is sometimes necessary’ because meta-level learning is ‘not a mere extension of the discourse but rather involves new ways of doing things with words’ (Sfard 2015:251). In the context of metalinguistic talk about writing, the role of teacher-as-expert is as critical as the role of teacher-as-facilitator.

Conclusion This chapter has argued for the critical importance of dialogic teaching in opening up metalinguistic talk about linguistic choice in written text. This metalinguistic discussion is challenging as it requires the simultaneous interplay of grammatical knowledge, which is a closed knowledge set, with knowledge of how meaning is made, which is much more interpretive and open. It is a form of meta-level learning (Sfard 2015) which moves beyond everyday reading and writing experiences. Thus we propose a reframing of the role of the teacher in dialogic talk as both expert and facilitator. Like Boyd and Markarian (2015), we argue that a dialogic teacher ‘listens, leads and follows, responds and directs as he or she employs a repertoire of talk patterns across varied instructional approaches’ and in doing so is managing the complex interaction of exploratory talk and textual/grammatical knowledge. One might argue that this kind of talk is not dialogic because it is too oriented towards fixed educational outcomes: indeed, Matusov, in Matusov and Wegerif (2014) defines teaching which is leading towards some ‘preset curricular endpoints’ as monologic. However, there are different ways to think about, and realise, curriculum outcomes. In the case of writing, teaching which promotes a particular form of schooled writing, heavily shaped by assessment goals, can lead to developing writers learning hollow, ‘formulaic’ rules about good writing (Ryan 2014) and having little agency or independence as writers. Alternatively, dialogic teaching which fosters metalinguistic thinking and decision-making about writing is potentially empowering, democratising the writing process. It is, of course, fairly easy to subscribe to dialogic principles but to enact them monologically in practice, particularly if there is too much emphasis on surface characteristics of dialogic talk (Boyd and Markarian 2015), rather than on a dialogic stance. Alexander argues that ‘a dialogic pedagogy doesn’t necessarily presuppose a dialogic epistemology, but a dialogic epistemology cannot realistically be fostered by other than a dialogic pedagogy’ (Alexander 2018:5). In the context of writing, metatalk is essentially epistemologically dialogic: a view of learning about writing as an induction into a fluid community of practice, rather than compliant adherence to a set of conventions, and a view of writing as more about linguistic choice than linguistic performance.

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26 MAPPING THE TERRAIN OF DIALOGIC LITERACY PEDAGOGIES Maren Aukerman and Maureen Boyd

Although arguably not yet mainstream, dialogic pedagogy has become more visible within the field of literacy over the past few decades (Brindley, Juzwik & Whitehurst, 2016). Building on theorists such as Bakhtin, Freire, and Buber, literacy researchers often focus on classroom talk that is rich in joint inquiry, open and vigorous exchange of ideas, and engagement with other voices and selves. The increased visibility of dialogic literacy pedagogy raises the stakes around clearly articulating what scholars mean by it, particularly given that it carries the echoes of such varied voices and traditions. Our goal in this chapter is not to limit the field’s vision to a single conception but to build clarity around possible conceptions and to begin to tease out what these might mean – individually and in dialogue with one another – for classroom literacy teaching. Importantly, we resist over-simplifying dialogic literacy pedagogies to “accessible features alone” (Howe & Mercer, 2016) and instead map a terrain of value-oriented practices. All language can be conceived as dialogic in the sense that it is part of an ongoing chain of speech communication that addresses others and anticipates response. As Bakhtin has argued, “addressivity, the quality of turning to someone, is a constitutive feature of the utterance; without it the utterance does not and cannot exist” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 99), and theoretically all pedagogy mediated through language could be seen as dialogic in that basic sense. However, because language-in-use functions in ways that appear relatively more or less dialogic (Nystrand, 1997), we believe that the term dialogic pedagogy should be reserved for instances in which the unfolding of classroom practice is guided by instruction that seeks to foment greater dialogism. In other words, dialogic pedagogy is enacted value orientation, that is, a purposive unfolding of language and action in which the teacher deliberately seeks to animate a dialogic pedagogical value (or set of values). A dialogic pedagogical value may of course be animated without the teacher claiming that value or orienting toward it; for example, in classrooms where the teacher does not deliberately make space for student voices, students may still wrest space for student-centered conversation (Gutierrez & Rymes, 1995; Moschkovich, 2007). While such moments may well be important, dialogic pedagogy must, we believe, be purposeful from the teacher’s perspective. Conversely, as we elaborate next, a teacher may make deliberate choices in speech and action that diverge from what might typically be considered “dialogic” moves that nonetheless serve a dialogic value orientation (Boyd & Markarian, 2011). Such moves can, as part of a repertoire of talk practices, function to support dialogic classroom talk (Alexander, 2008; Burbules, 1993). 373

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What constitutes a dialogic pedagogical value is not always clear, however, particularly since not all enactments of dialogic pedagogy share the same orientations, and the scope of data examined constrains which enacted values are illuminated. This chapter is structured to map the terrain of dialogic literacy pedagogies according to value orientation. We developed our categories through an examination of research literature in literacy (primarily research where the authors draw explicitly on the term dialogic), as well as observations and experiences we have made in the world of practice and an informal survey of scholars in the field in which we elicited definitions of dialogic pedagogy. We noted pedagogical values that appeared to prominently figure in instructional practice and/or researcher perspective. We then sorted these dialogic value orientations within three overarching domains: those that primarily focus on how language unfolds; those that primarily focus on how thinking unfolds; and finally those that primarily focus on how relationships and communities unfold. These domains help make visible the scope and varied focus of dialogic pedagogy. In parts they overlap.That is to say, they do not (and should not) break out neatly. We consider it important that our categories retain overlap and embrace the principled messiness and agency of teacher purposeful animation of a dialogic value or set of values. We provide an example of overlap in the discussion section of the chapter. To begin, we focus on one dimension of language often highlighted within discussions of dialogic pedagogy, teacher language, and explain why it is not a value orientation.

Why teacher talk is not, itself, a value orientation A number of scholars (Boyd & Kong, 2017; Nystrand, 1997; Reznitskaya et al., 2012; Soter et al., 2008) have studied teacher language to identify teacher moves that may foment high-level student talk and thinking. These moves include, for example: Authentic/open questions. Questions that allow for a range of divergent authentic responses, without a single “right” answer. Uptake. Follow-up questions or bids for information that seek to elicit elaboration, explanation, and/or justification. Speculation and reasoning words. Words such as might, if, because, so that indicate a language of possibility and/or link to reasoning. Conversely, teacher moves described (Aukerman, Johnson, & Chambers Schuldt, 2017; Cazden, 2001; Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991; Wells, 1993) as frequently in tension with dialogic pedagogy include, for example: Test/closed questions. Questions posed to establish whether the interlocutor has the right answer. Evaluation. Moves that signal the teacher’s assessment of the correctness of a student’s response. Explicit explanation. Moves in which the teacher delivers information, typically in a manner that suggests authoritative knowledge (e.g., a lecture). Thinking about teacher moves can be analytically and pedagogically useful. For teachers seeking to become more dialogic, understanding how linguistic moves work, and learning to consciously engage in certain promising moves, can be concrete and potentially powerful steps (Aukerman, Belfatti, & Santori, 2005; Fecho & Botzakis, 2007; Reznitskaya, 2012). However, “dialogic” teacher moves are not primarily purposive in and of themselves but rather are purposive in how they enact value orientations. Teachers might perform such moves only 374

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procedurally – asking open questions without caring about the answers, for example – with the result that students still provide what they think the teacher wants to hear rather than a genuine answer (Alexander, 2008; Boyd & Markarian, 2011; Burbules, 1993). For these reasons, perhaps, a conversation containing ostensibly dialogic teacher moves can fail to elicit a multi-voiced dialogue among students just as a conversation with monologic teacher moves could be successful in eliciting one (Kachur & Prendergast, 1997). Some scholars (Boyd & Markarian, 2011, 2015;Wells, 2006) examine teacher moves not simply in terms of form but also in terms of function – a shift that inherently demands paying attention to what the students are doing. While those who focus on form look at a move’s formal linguistic characteristics, those who focus on function look at how moves are contingent on prior utterances and are taken up and sometimes renegotiated subsequently by others. For example, from a form-based perspective, a teacher who says “Right” after a student utterance generally would be considered to be evaluating the student; however, from a function-based approach, the “Right” might not function evaluatively, depending in part on intonation, prior history, and interlocutor interpretation – unless it functions evaluatively, it would not be considered evaluation. Function may be a richer way of examining teacher moves than form, if often less crisp analytically. Indeed, attention to teacher moves may be most helpful when their function is examined as a potential index of pedagogical values. It is to the value orientations frequently associated with dialogic literacy pedagogy that we now turn.

Value orientations toward how language unfolds Dialogic pedagogy in the service of extended student talk One value orientation toward dialogic pedagogy focuses on sharing turns at talk with students. Relative amount of teacher versus student talk might be one indicator, mean length of student utterances another. One pedagogical technique that generally fits with this conceptualization is Whitehurst and colleagues’ (1999) work with young children on dialogic reading. A key distinction in Whitehurst’s dialogic reading is that the child is not simply a listener but an active verbal participant as a story is being read. However, beyond the focus on verbal participation, the nature of the child’s intellectual agency in this approach is undefined, and (beyond an emphasis on scaffolding for vocabulary and other aspects of elaborated output) there are few parameters on the quality or tenor of the exchange. This orientation toward dialogic pedagogy provides insight into the role of verbal interaction in literacy learning. It suggests that talking with students offers something that talking at students typically does not. Yet, there are several limitations with setting the parameters for dialogic literacy pedagogy exclusively in this way. On the one hand, the parameters may be problematically narrow: only spoken response is honored. Dialogue is, after all, a matter of listening as well as speaking. A number of researchers have argued that silence can be a form of response and that deep intellectual engagement can take place even when the mouth is not running (Burbules, 1993; Schultz, 2009). Relatedly, some scholars have pointed out that less verbally interactive forms of talk, such as minilessons and lectures, can elicit valuable student thinking and talk, especially when a purposeful part of a repertoire of talk practices that vary across time and context (Alexander, 2008; Boyd, Mykula, & Choi, 2018; Burbules, 1993). Simultaneously, a focus on talk quantity may be problematically narrow. Indeed, students can be put into positions where they talk without being able to say much, what Segal and Lefstein (2016) call “exuberant, voiceless participation” (p. 1); they can be interlocutors without their textual ideas or interests playing a role; they can be interlocutors without listening or needing 375

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to listen closely; they can be interlocutors without themselves being heeded. Thus, a substantial concern with equating dialogic pedagogy with extended student talk per se is that it sets the interactional bar too low by allowing researchers an analytically convenient check-off and teachers a comfort that they “got it” if students are doing considerable amounts of talk, without attending to what is being said.

Dialogic pedagogy in the service of high-quality talk Another value orientation involves attention to the quality of student talk produced. Some scholars have highlighted linguistic markers of quality talk, for example, elaborated explanations, or student speculation and argumentation, or talk that follows certain discourse norms, such as Accountable Talk (Chinn, Anderson, & Waggoner, 2001; Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008; Soter et al., 2008; Wilkinson, Soter, & Murphy, 2010). For instance, Boyd, Chiu & Kong (2019) found recurring student use of speculation words signaled a classroom culture where alternate perspectives and student reasoning were welcome. While the specific types of student language highlighted may differ among scholars, all share a value orientation that seeks to have students generate high-quality talk (e.g., logically sound, based on textual evidence, visibly connected to other speakers through verbal signals such as “I agree” or “I disagree”). However, if fetishized, linguistic markers of high-quality talk can misrepresent. For example, talk that lacks oft-highlighted verbal signals of (dis)agreement might still be rich in heteroglossic exchange of thinking; students can signal the ways their ideas relate to those of peers in ways that don’t fall into neat verbal patterns (Aukerman et al., 2017).While linguistic markers can provide a useful indicator, they may not be a defining feature. Some of the concern with fetishization can be overcome by conceptualizing high-quality talk in broader ways that take into consideration sociohistoric patterning and functions of talk. Other concerns, however, apply even to less mechanistic conceptions of high-quality talk. One is that an emphasis on what the talk looks like may overshadow authentic interest in student thinking, in the actual ideas students bring to the table. Adherence to an expectation that talk should look a certain way can reify a perceived divide between children considered to be capable (because their verbal participation matches what is desired, perhaps privileging children from dominant culture backgrounds) and those seen as less capable (because they do not speak or because their verbal participation does not match what is desired). The focus on what children should do rather than on what they already bring as thinkers, readers, and writers can easily become enacted as a kind of deficit perspective toward children who are not doing talk “right”. Finally, educators arguably should recognize a wide range of forms of student expression as potentially dialogic, from the playful ways children may engage with text (Sipe, 2002) to their questioning of the very premises on which a text is based (Mellor & Patterson, 2001). Prizing only certain forms of student language may feed into limited and limiting conceptions of what rightfully should be a richly varied landscape of communication about text and curricular content.

Dialogic pedagogy in the service of socially engaged talk Others have highlighted the extent to which student discourse is socially engaged, a concept sometimes called exploratory talk or simply dialogic talk (Barnes, 2008; Wegerif, 2013). Here, the multiplicity of voices is central but so is the extent to which interlocutors engage with one another’s talk. More engagement with ideas of others signals a more dialogic conversation – it is interanimation of student ideas in talk, not just the presence of multiple ideas per se, that matters. Some documented ways of students engaging with other students’ textual ideas include build376

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ing through agreement, through conceptually related contributions, and through contestation of peer ideas (Aukerman et al., 2017) and collaborative attending to multimodal as well as written forms of text (Maine, 2013). Taken in isolation, a limitation of this value orientation is that it does not fully engage with the intimate and at times troubling relationship between talk and power. Whose ideas are the ones on which peers build? Whose ideas are contested or discounted, at what social and emotional cost? When might it be an act of self-preservation or wisdom to refuse to engage with peer talk that is verbally aggressive or troubling in terms of content (e.g., racist, sexist)? In short: what is the relationship between socially engaged talk and socially just talk? Only by adopting additional value orientations, we believe, does that relationship get the attention it deserves.

Dialogic pedagogy in the service of heeding student sense-making Finally, another value orientation centers on the role language can play in illuminating how students are making sense of their worlds and of texts in light of those worlds. In the words of one teacher describing his students’ text discussions: “‘You can see … how that child is organizing his or her world, and their understanding of the world, because they are making sense of their world’” (Aukerman & Chambers Schuldt, 2017, p. 421). The key in this orientation is not the characteristics of the language itself but its capacity to reveal something about student sensemaking.The orientation of the teacher is one of interest, respect, and curiosity toward that which the student brings as a reader, a writer, a thinker. Illuminating and heeding what students have to say and are interested in matters, while conversely “dismissing, ignoring or otherwise not engaging with someone’s voice is another way of silencing it” (Segal & Lefstein, 2016, p.6). Like other orientations that focus on unfolding language, this orientation runs the risk of overprivileging the spoken word. Taken too far, an emphasis on student speech could unduly pressure students, particularly students who feel unsafe sharing their thoughts. Even genuine respect and curiosity on the part of the teacher may not be enough for students to want to share their textual understandings publicly. However, if students’ right not to share is meaningfully preserved, seeking to illuminate and understand student sensemaking that becomes visible in talk may be a highly respectful stance. In addition to being valuable in itself, it may open up avenues for building from students’ understandings in the service of meaningful and lasting content learning.

Summing up orientations toward unfolding language All orientations toward unfolding language raise questions. Does any student talk animating a value count, even if participation patterns are problematic in terms of race, gender, class, or posited academic ability? Does there need to be some kind of relatively equitable distribution of participation? Is it possible that some students who do not speak nonetheless are engaged if they are thinking about what has been said? It may be most productive to accept that what instantiates talk that matters is somewhat messy and situational.

Value orientations toward unfolding thinking Dialogic pedagogy as facilitation of how to think A number of scholars emphasize quality of student thinking, particularly reasoning, as a desired value orientation. We have, previously, alluded to how argumentation – the in-the-moment verbalization of reasoning – is valued as a specific form of high-quality talk. However, high-quality 377

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reasoning is also seen by some researchers as a valued outcome in itself, in some cases measurably distinct from traditional literacy skills (e.g., Kuhn & Crowell, 2011). Scholars who focus on this idea emphasize thinking as a critical underlying habit that dialogic pedagogy can foster: When pupils are encouraged to reason and argue about ideas they are being invited to adopt the habits of critical inquiry that test existing orthodoxies and challenge the natural order of things. They might ask: What constitutes knowledge? How is knowledge organised, interpreted and communicated? Who owns knowledge? Whose ideas are salient? (Wolfe & Alexander, 2008, p. 2) Dialogic pedagogy, in this view, fosters a critical, questioning mindset among student thinkers; other variations on the theme of teaching students how to think emphasize the role of dialogue in promoting literacy-specific forms of thinking such as assessed reading comprehension or writing mastery (Murphy, Wilkinson, Soter, Hennessy, & Alexander, 2009; Nystrand, 2006; Nystrand & Graff, 2001). While we share the view that a critical mindset can be powerful, we have concerns about the potential embedded within this perspective to privilege just one kind of engagement with text, one that positions reading as a cognitive exercise and that treats the affective, social, or communal dimensions of dialogue as secondary (if recognized at all). Furthermore, by virtue of the fact that students are unlikely to manifest equal skill in narrowly defined thinking skills, becoming a student whose intellect is valued may be less accessible to some. Finally, focusing attention on what students should be doing, argument-wise, may draw attention away from their actual sense-making, an often messy process that does not always follow neat logical thought patterns.

Dialogic pedagogy as facilitation of interthinking or intercomprehending Other scholars of dialogic pedagogy have highlighted the quality of intellectual engagement with the ideas of others, a sociocognitive perspective. Mercer (2000) has used the term interthinking to emphasize “joint, coordinated intellectual activity which people regularly accomplish using language” (p. 16). Aukerman and colleagues (2017) describe a kind of interthinking that may take place within the literacy classroom that they term intercomprehending, the emergent, responsive work that readers undertake to make sense of a text while engaged in dialogue that builds and builds on a collaborative ideational repertoire, a range of textual ideas generated before, during, and after reading in order to construct and ponder the text’s meaning(s). (p. 489) Interthinking and intercomprehending allow space for honoring non-verbal forms of engagement. While they depend upon joint talk, it is not strictly the interplay of words but rather the intermingling of, and the co-development of, ideas – not all of which may be expressed in verbal form even as they build contingently upon what is verbally expressed in the group (the collaborative ideational repertoire) – that crucially determine dialogicality. A classroom exchange is dialogic to the extent that ideas of multiple interlocutors – including, crucially, the ideas of other students – shape the further development of ideas of those present. When interthinking and intercomprehending do not demand high-quality student talk of a prespecified form, nor thinking of a prespecified nature (e.g., “good” reasoning), this orienta378

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tion toward dialogic pedagogy may be less likely to fall prey to a gatekeeping instinct vis-à-vis student contributions. A key question to ask is not “Is the student’s idea right?” or even “Is the student’s idea well-reasoned?” but rather, “Does the student think with and from and against the ideas of others in the class?”, and “How does my teaching support or impede such thinking?” In other words, interthinking and intercomprehending embody attentive listening and relational and situational responding on the part of students. However, dialogic pedagogy centered on interthinking/intercomprehending leaves the role of the teacher unspecified. While this lack of specificity has some advantages over a direct focus on teacher moves – after all, there may be ways to elicit interthinking that go beyond dialogic talk recipes – it draws more attention to the what than to the how. In and of itself, it does not articulate a transformed role for the teacher. It also raises questions about what relationship a teacher should adopt toward students who may prefer, sometimes or most of the time, to think and read alone.

Summing up value orientations toward thinking Value orientations centered on student thinking all have in common a concern for the intellectual work of students. However, they vary in the extent to which dialogue involving student thinking is expected to be teleological (Burbules, 1993), that is, imagining student dialogue as a structured means to a convergent endpoint, what Habermas has called the “unforced force of the better argument” (1996, p. 350), versus non-teleological (Burbules, 1993), that is, imagining a play of dialogue in which continued divergence in perspective is seen as generative.This difference points to another potential value orientation of interest, as we elaborate in the next section.

Value orientations toward how relationships and communities unfold Dialogic pedagogy as shared intellectual/interpretive authority An orientation that values shared intellectual and interpretive authority seeks to shift the traditional intellectual power dynamic of the classroom. Traditionally, the teacher is the primary knower; students are secondary knowers whose knowledge is dependent on matching the understanding of the teacher (Berry, 1981). In the literacy classroom specifically, reading comprehension has often been seen as getting the meaning “right”, and the teacher’s role is seen as one that scaffolds and evaluates in the service of moving students toward increased capacity for “right” meaning-making (Aukerman, 2013). Even some scholars of dialogic pedagogy discuss it in terms of teaching children how to think (e.g., Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013), suggesting that teachers have “right” thinking at their command that they must transfer to students. An orientation that values shared interpretive authority adopts a more Freirean approach (Shor & Freire, 1987) as the teacher works to support students as they develop and challenge ideas in a democratic exchange of ideas.This orientation seeks to allow not just for the distribution of thinking in the classroom but also for the distribution of intellectual agency. Lyle’s (2008) focus on dialogic engagement through the Philosophy for Children approach is one example of such an approach. Lyle argues for an active learner role in developing personally constructed understanding through dialogic interchange and for inviting and valuing a multiplicity of voices. Teachers are not just responsive to student ideas but suspend their own evaluative judgment, inviting students to think for themselves: “Dialogue is valued as a key to self-knowledge and mutual understanding, but does not seek consensus” (2008, p. 234). The work of the classroom, from this perspective, is not only to think together but to also exercise interpretive power and to encounter the interpretive power of others – a classroom 379

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culture cultivating freedom to choose what one believes and thinks and even to choose an intellectual path substantially different from the teacher or from peers, must be honored. While elements of socialization and the current social context make that freedom far from absolute, students can and do bring fundamental differences in perspective that are not necessarily resolved through discussion – and facilitators of discussion should be wary of seeking consensus not only because this may usurp the interthinking itself but also because it fails to respect difference in thinking as constitutive of heteroglossic, democratic dialogue (Aukerman & Chambers Schuldt, 2016). A core idea within this perspective is that interthinking is unlikely to be democratic if a single perspective – that of the teacher, usually though not always – is a foregone, discursively privileged conclusion. This value orientation may be particularly important for those who see dialogic pedagogy as a means of building a democratic citizenry. It is also arguably the primary one, among those associated with dialogic pedagogy, that explicitly furthers critical literacy in ways that seek to overturn the intellectual status quo in classrooms (cf. Aukerman, 2012). However, the at-oddsness with traditional schooling also poses a tension. Teachers sometimes do use their intellectual authority in productive ways to develop new knowledge and to counter hegemonic perspectives, for example. And, while literacy is a domain that may offer more space for multiple perspectives to prevail than, say, mathematics, there may still be times when the multiplicity of student perspectives does not align well with literacy learning goals.

Dialogic pedagogy as enacted ethic of relating Dialogic pedagogy, in some conceptions, is about a way of authentically relating, focusing particularly (though not exclusively) on the role of the teacher. Buber (1950) distinguishes relations of I–Thou (I really see and hear you, I engage with who you are and seek to understand it) and relations of I–It (I encounter you primarily as object, as a category, as an instrument for accomplishing my ends). What this looks like is likely to differ across disciplines, but within the literacy classroom, relating in the I–Thou sense means that student voices and textual perspectives should not be seen as a means to an end but rather as worthy – by virtue of the very humanness of us all – of being heard and considered deeply.The Thou of the child, of the student, is in what the child brings as a reader/writer (thoughts and ideas about/in text) and as a human being (an identity, both in relation to and beyond literacy). The value of a literacy practice or activity, furthermore, depends on students finding it authentic – demanding that a student take part in an activity in which they have no stake is fundamentally disregarding the Thou of that person. Honoring the relational dimension of dialogic pedagogy points toward seeking ways in which literacy instruction might help students find meaning, joy, and a positive literate identity in text and in literacy practices. Entering into dialogue in a Buberian sense can be spoken or silent, but teachers must enter into relation not for their own ends, nor even for ends they might imagine might be good for the student in a categorical sense (e.g., becoming a better reader or reasoner), but in order to engage with what the other person brings – the sort of relating that acknowledges the deep humanity of others and, in the process, makes us more human. Aukerman (2013) has developed this idea in relation to textual sensemaking, arguing: Respect for the reader certainly does not mean the absence of challenge, nor even the absence of consequences when the reader resolves meaning for a text that is not plausible to others. But it does require, first, that the teacher hear what each reader

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does with a text as fundamentally bound up with that person’s identity, agency, and humanness … It follows that the teacher should wholeheartedly strive to make sense of the textual sensemaking of her/his students, and to engage with that sensemaking, answering it in a way that honors it. (p. A21) While the teacher plays a pivotal role as one who relates to the humanness, we-ness, and textual sense-making of students, a goal is to build classroom communities where all members engage with one another in these ways, where students also see one another, not just as sources of knowledge or clever interlocutors, but as valued humans with whom intellectual and simply human engagement (around and beyond text) matters. Boyd and her colleagues’ studies of Morning Meeting and Writing Workshop show ways collaborative practices might enact such relations (Boyd, Jamark, & Edmiston, 2018; Boyd, 2016a). This orientation to dialogic pedagogy is difficult to pin down, from an analytic perspective. It is perhaps the least tied to language in pre-determinable, mappable ways – there are no linguistic markers that typify this relating, and even examining language functions is of limited use, because relating responsively and response-ably (Boyd, 2016b) does not map onto functions that operate the same for all interlocutors.That it is necessarily situated and idiosyncratic does not, however, diminish its importance. Indeed, as Howe and Mercer (2016, p. 90) point out, “there is danger in oversimplification if the accessible features alone [of dialogic education] become the object of study”.

Summing up value orientations toward how relationships and communities unfold Dialogic value orientations toward how relationships and communities unfold share a commitment to valuing what is known and difference as a resource. While such value orientations are relatively easy to espouse as abstract principles, they are challenging to enact in practice because difference is arguably hard for humans – including thoughtful teachers and researchers – to fully and meaningfully embrace. Adopting these value orientations, then, may justly be seen as often partial, a work in progress.

Discussion We have identified dialogic pedagogy as potentially serving the following pedagogical value orientations: How language unfolds Extended student talk High-quality student talk Socially engaged student talk Heeding of student sense-making How thinking unfolds How to think Interthinking/intercomprehending How relationships and communities unfold Shared intellectual/interpretive authority Enacted ethic of relating

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While far from exhaustive as an enumeration of value orientations one could conceivably associate with dialogic literacy pedagogy, the previous list provides an overview of prominent orientations currently shaping research and practice in the field. The orientations we have identified partially overlap with those in an important typology of dialogic pedagogy not specific to the field of literacy that Lefstein and Snell (2014) recently developed. Each value orientation could be seen as something of intrinsic value, as an end in itself. Each could also be seen as a means of achieving other value orientations and/or other valued classroom goals, such as fostering reading achievement or learning of content material. (We should note that it is conceivable that one could hold a value orientation that sees dialogic pedagogy as primarily in the service of the learning of content material. However, we did not locate literacy research that primarily oriented toward dialogic pedagogy in this way.) Each value orientation can also be productively examined at and across different timescales: one can look at dialogic moments/spells within lessons, at the interactional flow of individual lessons, at the orchestration of pedagogy across lessons, units, and even broader stretches of instruction. Indeed, the critical importance of unpacking talk practices across time to understand the roles of talk in thinking and development without oversimplifying those roles has been clearly articulated (repeated participation: Wortham, 2005; time and timing of types of talk in writing workshop: Boyd, Mykula, & Choi, 2018; comparing monologic and dialogic discourses: Wells, 2006; understanding talk moves in context of talk sequences: Lefstein & Snell, 2014; macro–micro iterative analysis through sociocultural discourse analysis: Mercer, 2008). Particularly when viewed across time, a number of value orientations toward dialogic pedagogy identified here may well be closely related, functioning synergistically under many circumstances. For example, in Aukerman and Chambers Schuldt’s (2017) study of the beliefs and practices of a literacy teacher who sought to teach dialogically, the underlying principles articulated by both the researchers and the teacher in the study included (pp. 413–414): “Surfacing and valuing student voices” (consonant with the goals of extended student talk, heeding student sensemaking, and an enacted ethic of relating); “interanimation of voices” (consonant with the goal of interthinking/intercomprehending); and “openness to heteroglossic textual ideas” (consonant with socially engaged talk and shared intellectual/interpretive authority).There was little articulation of a sense of tension between these principles by the teacher. Potentially, by virtue of the shared interpretive authority and the teacher’s ability to communicate that he was heeding their sensemaking, students may have felt freer to speak up and share their thoughts; the extended talk fomented in this way could further work in the service of greater intercomprehending and socially engaged talk. However, this very example also illustrates that not all value orientations will be equally foregrounded; value orientations emphasizing high-quality talk or how to think did not appear prominently in the discussion by either the teacher or the researchers in the Aukerman and Chambers Schuldt (2017) study. By contrast, Wilkinson and his colleagues (2017) put forward facilitation of reasoning (highly consistent with an emphasis on high-quality talk and how to think) as central in the kind of pedagogy they aim to help teachers facilitate. At the same time, their work is less explicit in its articulation of some of the other value orientations. These finer distinctions may be rendered invisible when the various value orientations function synergistically. However, classroom dialogue does not always fall into neat alignment with all value orientations equally; indeed, there may be times when a decision to serve one value orientation demands some sacrifice in terms of serving another (cf. Lefstein & Snell, 2014). For example, valuing all student voices may at times be at odds with a focus on students generating high-quality talk, since the very premise of high-quality talk is that some talk is valued more than other talk.To cope with, embrace, or navigate potential tensions among value orientations, 382

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a teacher/researcher may need to adopt a dialogic stance (see Boyd & Markarian, 2011, 2015) that privileges one or more of these goals and/or prioritizes amongst them as guiding values. We acknowledge pedagogical potential in each orientation, as well as potential pitfalls – some of which we have sought to articulate. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to resolve the individual or collective limitations of different value orientations (if indeed they can be resolved?), but we do believe that dialogue that gives voice to differing value orientations may open spaces for both identifying and working through points of difficulty associated with particular value orientations. The notion of dialogic repertoire becomes newly important when conceptualized not as a single monolithic dialogic stance but as footwork that involves deliberate negotiation among various dialogic value orientations guiding the work of teaching.

References Alexander, R. (2008). Toward Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk. Cambridge: Dialogos. Aukerman, M. (2012). “Why do you say yes to pedro, but no to me?” Toward a critical literacy of dialogic engagement. Theory Into Practice, 51(1), 42–48. Aukerman, M. (2013). Rereading comprehension pedagogies:Toward a dialogic teaching ethic that honors student sensemaking. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 1(1), A1–A30. Aukerman, M., Belfatti, M., & Santori, D. (2005). Am I teaching comprehension? Questions and challenges as teachers move toward more dialogically organized reading instruction. Paper presented at the National Reading Conference, Miami, FL. Aukerman, M., & Chambers Schuldt, L. (2016). Closely reading “reading closely”. Language Arts, 93(4), 286–299. Aukerman, M., & Chambers Schuldt, L. (2017). Bucking the authoritative script of a mandated curriculum. Curriculum Inquiry, 47(4), 411–437. Aukerman, M., Chambers Schuldt, L., Martin, P. C., & Aiello, L. (2017). What meaning-making means among us: The textual intercomprehending of emergent bilinguals in small-group text discussions. Harvard Education Review, 87(4), 482–511. Aukerman, M., Johnson, E. M., & Chambers Schuldt, L. (2017). Reciprocity of student and teacher discourse practices in monologically and dialogically organized text discussion. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 13(2), 1–52. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barnes, D. (2008). Exploratory talk for learning. In N. M. S. Hodgkinson (Ed.), Exploring Talk in School: Inspired by the Work of Douglas Barnes (pp. 1–16). London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Berry, M. (1981). Systemic linguistics and discourse analysis: A multi-layered approach to exchange structure. In M. Coulthard & M. Montgomery (Eds.), Studies in Discourse Analysis (pp. 120–145). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Boyd, M. P. (2016a). Calling for response-ability in our classrooms. Language Arts, 93(3), 226–233. Boyd, M. (2016b). Connecting Man in the Mirror: Developing a classroom dialogic teaching and learning trajectory. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 16, 1–16. Boyd, M.P., Chiu, M. M., & Kong, Y. (2019). Signaling a language of possibility space: Management of a dialogic discourse modality through speculation and reasoning word usage. Linguistics and Education, 50, 25–35. Doi:10.1016/j.linged.2019.03.002 Boyd, M., Jamark, C., & Edminston, B. (2018). Building bridges: Coauthoring a class handshake, building a classroom community. Pedagogies: An International Journal. Advanced on-line copy is available. doi:10. 1080/1554480X.2018.1437731 Boyd, M., & Kong,Y. (2017). Reasoning words as linguistic features of exploratory talk: Classroom use and what it can tell us. Discourse Processes, 54(1), 62–81. Boyd, M., & Markarian, W. (2011). Dialogic teaching: Talk in service of a dialogic stance. Language and Education, 25(6), 515–534. Boyd, M., & Markarian, W. (2015). Dialogic teaching and dialogic stance: Moving beyond interational form. Research in the Teaching of English, 49(3), 272–296. Boyd, M., Mykula, V., & Choi, Y. (2018). Dialogue as instruction: Purposeful and response-able writing workshop minilesson talk in a second grade classroom. In R. Gillies (Ed.), Promoting Academic Talk in Schools: Global Practices and Perspectives (pp. 161–183). New York: Routledge. Chapter 11.

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Maren Aukerman and Maureen Boyd Brindley, S., Juzwik, M., & Whitehurst, A. (2016). Diversifying dialogic discourses. L1-Educational Studies on Language and Literature, 16, 1–10. Buber, M. (1950). I and Thou (R. G. Smith, Trans.). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Burbules, N. (1993). Dialogue in Teaching:Theory and Practice. New York: Teachers College Press. Cazden, C. (2001). Classroom Discourse:The Language of Teaching and Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Chinn, C. A., Anderson, R. C., & Waggoner, M. A. (2001). Patterns of discourse in two kinds of literature discussion. Reading Research Quarterly, 36(4), 378–411. Fecho, B., & Botzakis, S. (2007). Feasts of becoming: Imagining a literacy classroom based on dialogic beliefs. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 50(7), 548–558. Gutierrez, K. D., & Rymes, B. (1995). Script, counterscript, and underlife in the classroom: James Brown versus Brown v. Board of education. Harvard Educational Review, 65(3). 445–471. Habermas, J. (1996). On the cognitive content of morality (C. Cronin,Trans.). In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Vol. 96, pp. 336–358). Blackwell Publishing. Howe, C., & Mercer, N. (2016). Special issue on dialogic commentary on papers in special issue on dialogic learning and teaching. Language and Education, 31(1), 83–92. Kachur, R., & Prendergast, C. (1997). A closer look at authentic interaction: Profiles of teacher-student talk in two classrooms. In M. Nystrand (Ed.), Opening Dialogue:When Recitation Becomes Conversation (pp. 75–88). New York: Teachers College Press. Kuhn, D., & Crowell, A. (2011). Dialogic argumentation as a vehicle for developing young adolescents’ thinking. Psychol Sci, 22(4), 545–552. Lefstein, A., & Snell, J. (2014). Better than Best Practice: Developing Dialogic Pedagogy: Routledge. Lyle, S. (2008). Dialogic teaching: Discussing theoretical contexts and reviewing evidence from classroom practice. Language and Education, 22(3), 222–240. Maine, F. (2013). How children talk together to make meaning from texts: A dialogic perspective on reading comprehension strategies. Literacy, 47, 150–156. Mellor, B., & Patterson, A. (2001).Teaching readings? In B. Comber & A. Simpson (Eds.), Negotiating Critical Literacies in Classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Mercer, N. (2000). Words and Minds: How We Use Language to Think Together. London: Routledge. Mercer, N. (2008). The seeds of time: Why classroom dialogue needs a temporal analysis. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 17(1), 33–59. Michaels, S., O’Connor, C., & Resnick, L. B. (2008). Deliberative discourse idealized and realized: Accountable talk in the classroom and in civic life. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27(4), 283–297. Moschkovich, J. (2007). Examining mathematical discourse practices. For the Learning of Mathematics, 27(1), 24–30. Murphy, P. K., Wilkinson, I. A. G., Soter, A. O., Hennessy, M. N., & Alexander, J. F. (2009). Examining the effects of classroom discussion on students’ comprehension of text: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(3), 740–764. Nystrand, M. (1997). Opening Dialogue: Understanding the Dynamics of Language and Learning in the English Classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. Nystrand, M. (2006). Research on the role of classroom discourse as it affects reading comprehension. Research in the Teaching of English, 40, 392–412. Nystrand, M., & Gamoran, A. (1991). Instructional discourse, student engagement, and literature achievement. Research in the Teaching of English, 25, 261–290. Nystrand, M., & Graff, N. (2001). Report in argument’s clothing: An ecological perspective on writing instruction in a seventh-grade classroom. The Elementary School Journal, 101(4), 479–493. Reznitskaya, A. (2012). Dialogic teaching: Rethinking language use during literature discussions. The Reading Teacher, 65(7), 446–456. Reznitskaya, A., Glina, M., Carolan, B., Michaud, O., Rogers, J., & Sequeira, L. (2012). Examining transfer effects from dialogic discussions to new tasks and contexts. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 37(4), 288–306. Reznitskaya, A., & Gregory, M. (2013). Student thought and classroom language: Examining the mechanisms of change in dialogic teaching. Educational Psychologist, 48(2), 114–133. Schultz, K. (2009). Rethinking Classroom Participation: Listening to Silent Voices. New York: Teachers College Press. Segal, A., & Lefstein, A. (2016). Exuberant, voiceless participation: An unintended consequence of dialogic sensibilities? L1 Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 16, 1–19. Shor, I., & Freire, P. (1987). What is the ‘dialogical method’ of teaching? Journal of Education, 169(3), 11–31.

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SECTION V

Dialogic education and digital technology

SECTION INTRODUCTION Dialogic education and digital technology Simon Knight

The chapters in this section of the book focus specifically on dialogic education and digital technology. To frame this chapter, it is important to understand why there should be mutual interest among those who are interested in the role of dialogic approaches and the role of digital technologies in learning. At weakest, such shared theorising is important simply because technology is increasingly available (indeed, pervasive) in our everyday lives and classrooms. In this view, technologies are more or less neutral actors to be leveraged as we wish; we should thus understand how to develop dialogic approaches in this emerging context. However, while of course rapid technological change creates an imperative to understand the impact of that change, this narrow perspective is a view that sociocultural researchers and those interested in dialogic approaches would reject. A somewhat stronger claim, then, and one that is made explicitly by Major and Warwick (this section) is that those who are interested in dialogic approaches to learning should be interested in digital technologies with respect to the affordances or possibilities for action that those technologies create for dialogue. A corollary, then, is that those interested in digital technologies should be interested in how they might develop and research tools that create or embody such affordances for dialogue and learning. Within this context, digital tools can be seen as affording opportunity to, for example, make learning visible to students and teachers as an artefact for reflection and improvement, creating sharing space to scrutinise ideas, and showing how ideas evolve over time. Moreover, as Major and Warwick note, we care not only about the action possibilities but also the enacted affordances for dialogue – i.e., the specific ways in which the action possibilities are implicated in promotion of dialogic interaction for learning and indeed, as Rasmussen et al. note, the ways that new tools provide both new affordances (or possibilities) and obstacles. However, a stronger claim again is that we should be interested in the relationships between dialogic approaches to learning and digital technologies for learning because dialogue is both shaped by digital technologies and helps to shape both the use and emergence of those technologies. That is, to use the language of Major and Warwick, in addition to technology creating affordances for dialogue, dialogue also creates affordances for particular uses of technology; the two are thus in mutually constitutive interaction. Put another way, Kumpulainen, Rajala, and Kajamaa (this section) distinguish materialdialogic spaces in which the focus is (1) about artefacts of digital technologies – i.e., dialogue centred on digital technology; (2) around digital technologies – i.e., dialogue that is in the 389

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context of these technologies, a context which is expanded by the very use of those digital technologies, through their affordances for dialogue; and (3) through digital technologies, which might be characterised in terms of meaning that is mutually constituted in and through the dialogue and materiality of the digital technologies. Each of these perspectives can be seen in the chapters in this section of the handbook, each with important implications for how we understand and foster dialogue approaches, and digital technologies, for learning.

Chapters in this section The affordances – or possibilities for action – of digital technologies for dialogic approaches are the focus of Major and Warwick’s contribution. The authors first provide an overview of a recent review of the interactions between classroom dialogue and digital technology, unpacking the significance of the notion of ‘affordances’ for our understanding of digital technology. They briefly discuss the kinds of affordances identified in the literature on classroom dialogue and digital technology, before introducing an extended exemplification in their discussion of the microblogging tool Talkwall. Talkwall is also the focus of Rasmussen, Amundrud, and Ludvigsen’s contribution, in which they highlight the way that new technologies bring both new possibilities and constraints to interaction. As the authors note, technologies can change the nature of communication. The ways that the ground rules – the rules that people make to manage interactions in particular situations – emerge is influenced by context, and in this case, the design or affordances of a technology, and the context of its wider use. As such, where technologies – such as social media tools – have established modes of use, these practices may influence the emergence of ground rules in learning contexts. Indeed, focusing on collaborative creativity, Pifarré notes the way that digital technologies can provide a particular kind of medium and set of artefacts that shape our thinking. Using examples from secondary education, Pifarré discusses the ways that technologies can make visible and ‘tangible’ dialogic spaces, with the technologies affording opportunities for co-creativity through physical manipulations of artefacts, the representation of ideas in the form of these artefacts, and relationship building with collaborators through the experience of working with shared artefacts. In Kumpulainen, Rajala, and Kajamaa’s terms, this interactivity comes about because of the ways that technologies provide material artefacts that become ‘social objects’. These ‘social objects’ emerge from the way that material objects – in this example, those created in secondary education maker spaces – are integrated into dialogic learning contexts. The authors discuss the range of ways that dialogue is oriented about, around, and through these material objects for dialogic learning. Of course, a key affordance of digital technologies for dialogic learning is that by making visible dialogue and material artefacts to learners and educators, the technologies also gather and store such data for further analysis and reflection.This affordance is the subject of Trausan-Matu’s contribution, which discusses the ways that technology can help us to analyse dialogic learning and support it. Trausan-Matu highlights the polyphonic characteristic of dialogic learning, its coherence, and diversity, and the need for inter-animation of voices to create this polyphony. In discussing how we might use computational tools to analyse polyphony in learning data, the author highlights four key considerations: (1) how do ideas – expressed through shared language, such as repeated phrases – appear and reappear throughout a dialogue; (2) how do these ideas explicitly and implicitly refer to previous parts of the dialogue, both over time (the way we repeat key phrases) and across voices (the way we bring multiple ideas together); (3) how 390

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we look for voices to converge, without conflict, or to diverge potentially to create new ideas; (4) and how ideas are inter-animated, debated across voices, to create convergence. The affordances of a key technology – Knowledge Forum – to support these processes and their analysis is a focus of Chan, Tong, and van Aalst’s contribution. The authors highlight the significant potential of kinds of knowledge creation or knowledge building (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014) in not only critiquing arguments and engaging with other’s ideas but in collectively creating new knowledge. As in Trausan-Matu’s contribution, the role of the technology as both a site for the dialogic, and its analytic potential, are highlighted, as well as their pedagogic implementation in classrooms, to create the environment for knowledge building. Such interactions appear particularly significant in a context where the role of technology in democracies is increasingly under the spotlight. The potential of CSCL technologies to foster democratic participation is the focus of Slakmon and Schwarz’s contribution.They draw attention to the important questions of: who participates in representation or governance (and how; whether as rulers or ruled); how they participate in these practices; and how practices are seen as legitimate governance or otherwise. As the authors note, dialogic approaches are fundamental to such questions; they concern how people engage on issues about which they may have no formal training, with people who may disagree with them, to develop civic participation. They thus argue for the potential of democratisation with CSCL, to develop civic participation. Similarly, Kleine Staarman, and Ametller foreground the potential of dialogic uses of digital technologies beyond the classroom environment. In their contribution the authors note that technology can support students in making connections between their formal and informal learning experiences, with teachers, to develop shared understanding and a learning trajectory. In this view, dialogue isn’t just about exchange but about the way that language is used relationally, and the ways that technology can reshape these practices, where technology is used not only to support activity but where activity occurs because of (‘invoked by’) the technology. The potential of such pedagogical link building is particularly significant in the context of connections between formal learning and workplace contexts, as Ligorio, Amenduni, and McLay discuss, drawing on examples from higher education. In their contribution the role of technology, identity, group work, and ‘trialogicical objects’ is discussed, to highlight how collaboratively created objects can support and structure interactions, to become boundaryobjects, that are designed by one community (here, university students), for us by another (here, e-learning customers). Identity and practice are key to understanding dialogue and technology use in this approach to understand how we position ourselves. This positioning occurs in the context of – dialogue and technology mediated – experiences such as those at university and professional practice, and these experiences impact on how we position ourselves with respect to communities.

Directions in dialogic education and digital technology The contributions in this section foreground for the reader both the strong lineage of work around dialogic approaches to learning, and digital technologies, and the ‘state of the art’ in that space.The role of technology and its potential in dialogic approaches is foregrounded, with clear illustrations from a range of technologies and pedagogic contexts. The chapters here provide an important overview, drawn from the myriad of work that explicitly or implicitly draws together digital technology and dialogic approaches for learning. For some kinds of technologies, these affordances for dialogue have been of longstanding interest to those working on dialogic approaches. For example, in a recent editorial (Stahl, Cress, Ludvigsen, & Law, 2014) the dialogic foundations of CSCL are drawn out, highlighting the 391

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strong philosophical ties and their relationship to the specific CSCL environments described in the issue. Other kinds of technology, though, have been less well explored in the context of dialogic learning. The chapters in this section touch on some of these technologies. Future work should investigate relationships of dialogic learning and tools such as 3D printers, which make possible the quick physical manifestation of idea building that embodies co-constructed thinking, to act as artefacts for that thinking to be improved through physical re-representations, mediated by the functional capacities of the 3D printing technologies. That is, the ways that technologies provide material improvable objects (Twiner, 2011) for thinking dialogically through the ways that they represent and re-represent. Even tools with longstanding histories in learning contexts are now being investigated in novel ways. A body of work, exemplified by Trausan-Matu’s contribution to this section, is investigating the role that technology has, not only in fostering dialogic learning, but in understanding it and adapting to it. A number of recent pieces have discussed how discoursebased computational analytics might be grounded in learning theory, to support learning (Clarke, Resnick, & Rose, 2018; Knight & Littleton, 2016). Such analysis also opens up the potential to develop new lines of research into dialogic learning and new tools to support that learning, such as ‘chat agents’ that are trained to engage students in dialogue or to act as an agent in group collaboration (for example, Kumar, Rosé, Wang, Joshi, & Robinson, 2007) Indeed, these applications are being developed across the kinds of context discussed in this section. For example, a new computational approach to understanding the development of dialogue that aligns with a community of practice called epistemic network analysis (grounded in ‘quantitative ethnography’) has been used to analyse both dialogically informed classroom activity (for example, Knight, Arastoopour, Williamson Shaffer, Buckingham Shum, & Littleton, 2014) and professional activity conducted within a ‘virtual internship’ (Shaffer, 2017; Shaffer et al., 2009). Indeed, game-based and dialogic learning has also shown promise in supporting areas such as citizenship education (for example, Chee, Mehrotra, & Liu, 2013). Bringing together digital technologies and dialogic approaches to learning holds great potential.This potential will be particularly fulfilled with approaches that recognise the mutually constitutive interaction of dialogic approaches and digital technologies, to support and shape learning. As the chapters in this section highlight, there is clear potential, and a need for further research, regarding the role of different kinds of technologies and the potential to analyse new kinds of data to gain insight into learning and use that analysis to develop new technologies and supports. Such work should occur both within formal educational settings and – as the contributions to this section make clear – across formal and informal settings and in wider civic society. Such a wide-reaching approach would make use of the potentials afforded by pervasive technological access and build on the fundamental theoretical underpinnings of dialogic approaches as a way to understand the world.

References Chee, Y. S., Mehrotra, S., & Liu, Q. (2013). Effective game based citizenship education in the age of new media. Electronic Journal of E-Learning, 11(1), 16–28. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1012864 Clarke, S., Resnick, L. B., & Rose, C. (2018). Discourse analytics for classroom learning. In D. Niemi, R. D. Pea, B. Saxberg & R. E. Clark (Eds.), Learning Analytics in Education. IAP. Knight, S., Arastoopour, G.,Williamson Shaffer, D., Buckingham Shum, S., & Littleton, K. (2014). Epistemic networks for epistemic commitments. In J. L. Polman, E. A. Kyza, K. D. O’Neill, I. Tabak, W. R. Penuel, S. Jurow, … & L. D’Amico (Eds.), 11th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (Vol. 3, pp. 150– 157). Boulder, CO: International Society of the Learning Sciences. Retrieved from http://oro.open. ac.uk/39254/

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Section introduction Knight, S., & Littleton, K. (2016). Dialogue as data in learning analytics for productive educational dialogue. Journal of Learning Analytics, 2(3), 111–143. Kumar, R., Rosé, C. P., Wang, Y.-C., Joshi, M., & Robinson, A. (2007). Tutorial dialogue as adaptive collaborative learning support. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, 158, 8. Scardamalia, N., & Bereiter, C. (2014). Knowledge building and knowledge creation: Theory, pedagogy, and technology. R. K. Sawyer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2nd ed., 397–417). New York: Cambridge University Press. Shaffer, D. W. (2017). Quantitative Ethnography. Madison, WI: Cathcart Press. Shaffer, D. W., Hatfield, D., Svarovsky, G. N., Nash, P., Nulty, A., Bagley, E., … , & Mislevy, R. (2009). Epistemic network analysis: A prototype for 21st-century assessment of learning. Retrieved from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/ijlm.2009.0013 Stahl, G., Cress, U., Ludvigsen, S., & Law, N. (2014). Dialogic foundations of CSCL. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 9(2), 117–125. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/ article/10.1007/s11412-014-9194-7 Twiner, A. (2011). Sociocultural Understandings of Technology-Mediated Educational Practices: Improvable Objects and Meaning-Making Trajectories in the ICT-Literate Classroom (Phd).The Open University. Retrieved from http://oro.open.ac.uk/33539/

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27 AFFORDANCES FOR DIALOGUE The role of digital technology in supporting productive classroom talk Louis Major and Paul Warwick

Introduction The place of language as a cultural tool for learning is central to sociocultural perspectives on social and cognitive development (Vygotsky, 1962, 1980), and a clear trajectory in academic discourse has been to consider dialogue as a particularly important tool for learning within classrooms (Barnes, 1976; Alexander, 2008; Howe & Abedin, 2013; Mercer & Dawes, 2014; Schwarz & Baker, 2016). As this Handbook makes evident, classroom dialogue is ‘more than just talk’; rather, there is a specific focus on sharing and evaluating ideas, building ideas collectively, reasoning, providing justifications and elaborations, and using evidence to support arguments. Recent technological advances and the enhanced availability of digital tools in classrooms (e.g. iPads – see Major, Haßler, & Hennessy, 2017) have seen increasing attention paid to the interaction between, and possible interdependency of, a dialogic pedagogy and digital technology. A particular focus has been on the mediating role of digital technology in enabling collective knowledge building (e.g. Hakkarainen, 2009); here, it is suggested that digital technology has the potential to extend conventional conceptions of dialogue to include semiotic-mediated activity (Wells, 1999; Twiner et al., 2010) and dialogic interactions that are not face-to-face or are asynchronous (Hoadley & Linn, 2000; Pifarré & Staarman, 2011). In this chapter, we present an overview of the first systematic scoping review to examine the interactions between classroom dialogue and digital technology (Major, Warwick, Rasmussen, Ludvigsen, & Cook, 2018). The outcomes of this review allow us to reflect on the role of digital technology in supporting productive classroom dialogue and to provide a springboard for other Handbook chapters in this section. Identified as a key theme during the scoping review, we go on to examine how conceptions of technology affordances are considered in relation to a dialogic pedagogy. Examining the use of digital technology in classrooms, we demonstrate how an understanding of affordance as broad categories pertaining to a range of ‘action possibilities’ presented by an object or scenario, as has traditionally often been the case, can inform more empirically based analyses of the ‘enacted affordances’ of specific technology. In particular, we suggest that this conceptualisation of a relationship between action possibilities and enacted affordances provides a novel lens through which the idea of ‘affordances for dialogue’ may be examined by researchers, practitioners, and developers interested in the role of digital technology in dialogic contexts. Reflecting on 394

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research involving the implementation of a micro-blogging tool developed to support classroom dialogue (Talkwall),1 we demonstrate this idea by considering how Talkwall is implicated in promoting dialogic interaction for learning. This is significant in exemplifying how the affordances associated with technology-mediated dialogue can be specifically, as well as broadly, analysed by researchers.

Two connected fields of interest: classroom dialogue and digital technology For those considering learning from a sociocultural perspective (Vygotsky, 1962, 1980), ideas relating to the mediation of thinking and action by cultural artefacts, and recognition of the interdependent relationship between thought and language, are central. Vygotsky argues that language is both a cultural tool (for the development and sharing of knowledge amongst members of a community) and a psychological tool (for structuring the processes and content of individual thought) (Mercer, Hennessy, & Warwick, 2017). Thus the theory not only links the social and the psychological in an account of cognitive development but also provides a theoretical basis for the primacy of language as a cultural and cognitive – and hence educational – tool (Mercer & Howe, 2012). This recognition of the key role of language in cognitive development has led to a focus on the modes of interaction that occur within classrooms (Calcagni & Lago, 2018). Supporters of dialogic pedagogical practices assert that classroom dialogue is ‘central to the meaning making process and thus central to learning’ (Mortimer & Scott, 2003, p. 3). The idea of ‘dialogic teaching’ (Alexander, 2008), which arises from a wider understanding of dialogue as a social phenomenon (Shor & Freire, 1987), emphasises dialogue as a process through which students learn to reason, discuss, argue, and explain. Dialogic pedagogy has a direct participatory imperative, seeking to legitimise and develop contributions from all parties in classroom interactions (Nystrand,Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser, & Long, 2003; Michaels & O’Connor, 2012); a central intention is ‘to foster learner agency, whereby students collaborate with others in seeking understanding, building from their own ideas and allowing other ideas and opinions to mediate and modify their thinking’ (Flitton & Warwick, 2013, p. 3). Through the use of a dialogic pedagogy a ‘dialogic space’ may be opened up, in which difference is both created and explored (Wegerif, 2010). Today, a robust body of research demonstrates how students who were taught dialogic skills improved in their reasoning and collaborative problem solving (e.g. Howe & Abedin, 2013; Mercer, 2013). Indeed, encouraging findings have been reported following an efficacy trial involving around 5,000 students (aged 9–10) where, after a ‘Dialogic Teaching’ intervention, a positive effect on attainment in English, science, and mathematics was found (judged equivalent to around two months additional progress; Jay et al., 2017; Alexander, 2018). A large-scale naturalistic investigation of whether more ‘dialogic’ teaching relates to children’s (aged 10–11) learning gains on standardised tests in mathematics and literacy, and to scientific reasoning and general reasoning, also identified several aspects of teacher–student dialogue to be positively associated with performance (Howe, Hennessy, Mercer,Vrikki, & Wheatley, 2019). The enhanced availability of digital tools capable of supporting young people to engage in constructive dialogue through or around digital platforms, has led to increasing attention being paid to the interaction between (and possible interdependency of) a dialogic pedagogy and digital technology. A key focus has been on the mediating role of digital technology – for instance tablet computers, interactive whiteboards, and computer-mediated communication tools (Haßler, Major, Warwick, Watson, Hennessy, & Nicholl, 2016) – in enabling collective 395

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knowledge building (Rasmussen & Ludvigsen, 2010; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994), extending ‘interthinking’ (Littleton & Mercer, 2013) and expanding ‘dialogic space’ (Wegerif & Major, 2018). The pervasiveness of technology capable of supporting dialogic processes, and the fact that the alignment of classroom-based digital technology with a dialogic pedagogy seems to suggest the possibility of ‘transformative’ learning, mean professional and research interest in the role of technology in supporting and enhancing dialogue is a legitimate and growing field. In order to explore this, we undertook a systematic scoping (mapping) review of literature focusing on the interactions between classroom dialogue and digital technology. This mapped extant research and, through a process of thematic synthesis, enabled us to offer the research community a means of accessing existing understandings, in addition to drawing together central ideas for further consideration. In the next section, we present a brief summary of our methodological approach and report our main findings to provide an overview of the characteristics of extant research in this area.

Scoping extant research to consider how digital technology supports classroom dialogue While research on classroom talk and dialogue is well established, research into the use of digital technology in classrooms generally is a relatively new area, and research into interactions between classroom dialogue and technology is recent. By combining these two themes in a single comprehensive review for the first time, we provide a framing device for reviewing new developments in a rapidly changing field. Scoping reviews are a rigorous and transparent form of secondary research and have offered a popular approach to appraising, for example, healthcare evidence for a number of years (Levac, Colquhoun, & O’Brien, 2010). They involve collecting, evaluating, and presenting available evidence (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005). This is interpreted and analysed at a ‘high level’, which allows for the identification of clusters and gaps that can inform the focus of future research (Kitchenham, Budgen, & Brereton, 2015). A stated strength of the methodology is its ability to identify the key features of a diverse body of research in a connected manner (Davis, Drey, & Gould, 2009). Today, scoping reviews are an accepted means for reviewing educational research across a range of domains, particularly where those domains are ‘breaking new ground’ (e.g. Major & Watson, 2018; Virtanen, Haavisto, Liikanen, & Kääriäinen, 2017). The first methodological framework for undertaking a scoping review was published by Arksey and O’Malley (2005) and later clarified and enhanced by Levac et al. (2010). Scoping reviews feature five main stages: (i) identifying the research question(s); (ii) identifying relevant studies; (iii) study selection; (iv) charting data; (v) collating, summarising, and reporting results. During our review, a systematic search was undertaken to identify relevant research published since 2000. A range of data was extracted from studies considered to be relevant including details about the country of research, research aims, digital technology(s) used, ages of students involved, academic context, methodological approach, and the number of students and teachers involved. An adapted version of the thematic synthesis method described by Thomas and Harden (2008) was also applied to develop ‘descriptive themes’ to characterise the body of extant research. The scoping review reveals how 72 studies (from the year 2000 onwards) report on the use of various digital technology to support classroom dialogue (Major et al., 2018). Studies were undertaken across 18 countries and involved both small and larger scale analyses. Technology investigated include Computer-Mediated Communication tools, Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs), subject-specific learning tools, mobile ‘apps’, tablet computers, blogging/microblogging tools, wikis, and touch table technology. The schooling context of this research is mixed with the 396

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proportion of research undertaken in primary/elementary (35 studies) and secondary/high (30 studies) schools being relatively even, with some research taking place in both of these contexts at the same time (7 studies). Finally, qualitative (33 studies) or mixed method (32 studies) research designs are reported in the majority of included studies. A greater proportion of this qualitative research took place in primary schools; more mixed methods research was in secondary schools. This is in comparison to a limited number of quantitative studies (seven in total). See Major and colleagues (2018) for a detailed account of our methodological approach and findings. In addition to enabling the broad characterisation of existing research, a process of thematic synthesis established three inter-related and inter-dependent high-level themes relating to how use of digital technology is reported to enhance productive classroom dialogue: (i) ‘dialogue activity’, (ii) ‘learning environment’, and (iii) ‘technological affordances’.2 ‘Dialogue activity’ consists of four sub-themes: alternative perspectives (both exposure to alternative perspectives and taking into account others’ views); knowledge co-construction (including in ways that are reported to be purposeful, sustained, and critically in-depth); using dialogue to express meta-cognitive learning, for example, classroom talk exhibiting elements of reflective self-assessment; and using dialogue to scaffold understanding (both learner–learner and teacher– learner). The rather more holistic theme of ‘learning environment’ identifies studies where the complexity of the classroom environment is of importance. Here five sub-themes were identified in relation to connections between dialogue and digital technology: learner autonomy; learner inclusion and participation; classroom atmosphere; interpersonal relationships; motivation and engagement. A third and final theme – ‘technological affordances’ – consists of nine sub-themes in total: creation of a shared dialogic space; mediating interaction; externalisation of ideas; informing teaching; multimodality; pace; provisionality; representation of content; temporal factors. These three overarching high-level themes identified by the scoping review are indicative of the close interaction between dialogue activity, the learning environment, and the affordances of various technology. Broadly, the ideas of ‘dialogue activity’ and ‘learning environment’ can be viewed to be what digital technology enables. ‘Technological affordances’, on the other hand, attempt to offer a means of explaining the properties technology has (Oliver, 2005). In the remainder of this chapter, we focus in particular on the ways in which research suggests that the affordances of digital technology may enhance productive classroom dialogue.

Unpacking the key theme of ‘technological affordances’ We begin this section by providing a brief introduction to the origins of the concept of affordance, highlighting how affordances have typically been conceptualised in terms of ‘action possibilities’ in relation to educational uses of digital technology. We then report and expand on the findings of the scoping review, which enabled a characterisation of broad technological affordances across a range of dialogic settings.

Origins of ‘affordance’ First attributed to perceptual psychologist James Gibson (1977), affordance was introduced to describe how individuals derive meaning from the world around them, what things in the world ‘afford’ them, in a relational sense (Osborne, 2014). Affordances are part of a relationship between an actor and artefacts, with these two parts of a whole system (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2012). Linell (2009) writes how Gibson thought of perception as being about ‘values’ rather than ‘stimuli’ and how he made a distinction between the ‘physical reality’ and that reality as an 397

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‘environment’ for a living species (p. 25). That is, the environment is the material world as perceived and apprehended as something (Wittgenstein, 1958/2009). In this sense, affordances are ‘enabling conditions’ that are part of an environment in a way that is meaningful (Linell, 2009, p. 332). The environment is not simply ‘physical reality’; affordances are interrelations between object and subject that take place in the ‘interworld’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1973). The concept has proven to be powerful, as reflected by it being taken up in a range of fields including artificial intelligence and robotics (Lemaignan, Warnier, Sisbot, Clodic, Alami, 2017), education (Bower, 2008), and human–computer interaction (Turner, 2005). However, the translation to other disciplines has not been without difficulty, and understanding of Gibson’s original notion of affordance has changed as different views have been added to it (Vyas, Chisalita, & van der Veer, 2006). Whilst it is of course common for ideas to evolve over time, multiple interpretations and definitions of affordance now exist resulting in ambiguity as to what the term means (Magnusson, 2010). Affordance in the context of educational technology is perhaps most commonly understood today in terms of ‘action possibilities’, which denote the possibilities that an environment provides to an actor (Kirschner, 2002).This is despite such an idea being absent in Gibson’s original definition. Indeed, it appears that this now widespread understanding of affordance arose around the time when the concept was first adopted into the field of design, primarily through the work of Norman (Norman, 1998). Osborne (2014, p. 66) writes: Throughout the literature on affordances, it seems that Gibson’s original concept is repeatedly and pervasively confused with the later work by Norman, and commonly re-defined solely in terms of action possibilities … search(es) of Gibson’s actual text from the Ecological Theory of Visual Perception reveals that the concept of ‘action possibilities’ or ‘possibilities for action’ is never actually mentioned.3 An interpretation of affordances as action possibilities can be helpful, particularly when designing new technology or considering the potential implementation of existing technology in new settings. Indeed, one way ‘affordance’ offers a distinctive perspective on the use of technology in education is because it can be used to consider possibilities for action (Hammond, 2010). When investigating the impact that technology has on actual learning processes and outcomes, however, such as those relating to the interactions between classroom dialogue and technology, viewing affordances as ‘action possibilities’ is of more limited value. Furthermore, it has been asserted that primarily concentrating on action possibilities can lead to a narrow focus on functionality because viewing affordances as action possibilities can be argued to ‘fixate (on) technologies as tools, “things” to be prodded, pushed or pulled’ (Osborne, 2014, p. 412) rather than exploring ‘the meaning that is provided by the environment with respect to a specific individual and at a specific moment in time’ (ibid, p. 69). This is an idea we return to in the Section “Developing the idea of ‘affordances for dialogue’”. First, however, we consider the ‘technological affordance’ sub-themes identified by the scoping review.

‘High-level’ affordances identified by the scoping review Nine ‘affordance’ sub-themes were established by the scoping review. These can be seen in Table 27.1, along with the number of studies reporting each affordance. Eleven studies identify how digital technology can provide both a tool and an environment for the creation of a shared ‘dialogic space’ where ideas can be put forward, respected, scrutinised, and challenged in a supportive discursive environment (Kerawalla, Petrou, & Scanlon, 2013). In doing so, 398

Affordances for dialogue Table 27.1 The nine ‘affordance’ sub-themes identified by the scoping review Affordance

No. of studies reporting

Representation of content Creation of a shared dialogic space Mediating interaction: a) Versatility b) Accessibility Temporal factors Multimodality Externalisation of ideas Informing teachers Pace Provisionality

12 11 11 10 9 7 5 5 5 5

technology enables learners to deploy joint action and a high level of collaboration when working on tasks (such as joint music composition [Nikolaidou, 2012]). Additional channels for students to ‘talk’ (e.g. through sending messages to each other [Looi et al., 2010]) may also be established. The accessibility of digital tools, and the positive impact this has on mediating interaction, is reported in ten studies. Familiarity is one reason identified for this, for both students (e.g. as they are comfortable using recognisable tools such as microblogging [Singleton, 2016]) and teachers (e.g. as it is possible to use technology during collaborative activities in ways closely related to more familiar classroom practice [Kershner, Mercer, Warwick, & Kleine Staarman, 2010]). The manner in which intuitive and easy manipulation of digital technology (e.g. iPads) can facilitate students’ collaborative talk (Kucirkova, Messer, Sheehy, & Fernández Panadero, 2014), and how such devices may afford potential for easy sharing of content (Khoo, Falloon, & Nguyen, 2016), is also reported. ‘Accessibility’ also extends to include the way in which classroom dialogue can be supported by the use of readily available and ‘generic’ tools, such as WhatsApp (Bouhnik & Deshen, 2014). How digital technology can be used as the object of interaction, a participant in interaction, or a tool for interaction is indicative of its versatility (Beauchamp & Kennewell, 2008), an idea identified in 11 studies. Five studies note how digital technology can enhance productive classroom dialogue via the externalisation of ideas by, for example, posting text to a screen (Mercer, Fernandez, Dawes, Wegerif, & Sams, 2003). Learners are then able to easily share and reflect on their own, and other people’s, ideas (e.g. Enyedy, 2003). Five studies also identify how technology can be used to inform teachers, for instance through monitoring progress (Erkens, Jaspers, Prangsma, & Kanselaar, 2005). In some cases, teachers can provide instant formative feedback as they can literally ‘see’ students’ misconceptions (Looi, Chen, & Ng, 2010). Alternatively, teachers may be able to use students’ ideas to elaborate, correct, and question students (Rasmussen & Hagen, 2015). The multimodal nature of digital technology, noted by seven studies, allows for greater flexibility in the delivery of resources. For example, the IWB boasts visual, auditory, and text-based functions (Mercer, Hennessy, & Warwick, 2010). The use of digital technology can also have a positive impact on the pace of lessons (e.g. Smith, Hardman, & Higgins, 2006). From a teacher’s perspective, increased pace enables teachers to display information rapidly and spontaneously (Gillen, Staarman, Littleton, Mercer, & Twiner, 2007). From the students’ perspective, they can feel that they have greater control over their learning as they may dictate the speed at which they work (Warwick, Mercer, Kershner, & Staarman, 2010). 399

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A further benefit of using digital technology is the ability to adapt or change ideas.The affordance seems often here to be situated in the visual support that the technology provides whilst, linked to this, the idea of ‘provisionality’ is identified in five studies. For example, ideas expressed using the IWB may be considered both fluid (Mercer et al., 2010) and transitory (Tanner & Jones, 2007), which helps to build students’ confidence when working with their own, and other people’s, ideas at the board. The ability to represent content in new and interesting ways is also reported in 12 studies (e.g. the processes involved in summarising information in a ‘tweet’ [Singleton, 2016]). Finally, nine studies identify ‘temporal factors’, for instance, the traceability of students’ ideas enabling dialogues to be sustained, and ideas to be built, over time (whether during a single lesson or a series of lessons; Kerawalla, 2015). Using technology can also allow students the ability to move back as well as forwards in some tasks (Kershner et al., 2010), whilst the ability to access all previous and current texts can allow for continuity between lessons (Maher, 2012). These themes provide a useful high-level framework for considering affordance in the context of classroom dialogue. Presented as synthesised previously, however, these themes are largely examples of action possibilities for a range of technology. Yet the learning environment and the specific functionality of particular tools determine the ways in which action possibilities come to relate to ‘enacted affordances’. This highlights one of the original notions of affordance (Gibson, 1977), in that, as individuals derive meaning from the world around them, the relationships between the individual, the context, and the tool are what determine both possibilities for action and subsequent enactment of affordances. In our view, therefore, they are inextricably linked.

Developing the idea of ‘affordances for dialogue’ In this section, we outline how affordance can be considered as comprised of two interrelated elements: ‘action possibilities’ and ‘enactment’. Referring to the idea of ‘affordances for dialogue’, we suggest this highlights a reinterpretation that may helpfully inform researchers, practitioners, and developers interested in the role of digital technology in dialogic contexts. Such an understanding is significant in exemplifying how the affordances associated with technologymediated dialogue can be specifically – as well as more broadly – analysed by researchers. We demonstrate this idea by reflecting on empirical research involving the implementation of the Talkwall micro-blogging tool.

Connecting ‘action possibilities’ and ‘enacted affordances’ Whilst high-level overviews of affordance possibilities can be informative (such as the one reported by the scoping review and elsewhere – e.g. Jeong & Hmelo-Silver, 2016), their broad nature means they can be of limited utility when applied to specific contexts where learning is mediated by technology. Further, when considering something as nuanced as the interactions between a dialogic pedagogy and digital technology, a focus on action possibilities in general terms risks telling only ‘part of the story’. Here, we advocate a view of affordance as acknowledging ‘action possibilities’ but additionally highlighting the value of recognising the closely related idea of ‘enactment’, that is, how affordances are specifically implicated in promoting dialogic interaction for learning. The scoping review considered the affordances of technology in an overarching sense, looking across research focused on a range of technology. In considering the idea of ‘affordances for dialogue’ in relation to specific technology, we suggest ‘action possibilities’ (APs) and ‘enacted affordances’ (EAs) for dialogue are intrinsically interlinked. See Figure 27.1. 400

Affordances for dialogue

Action Possibilities (APs)

Teachers’ development of dialogic pedagogy

Enacted Affordances (EAs)

Figure 27.1 Connecting Action Possibilities (APs) and Enacted Affordances (EAs).

This duality indicates how an understanding of affordance as broad categories pertaining to a range of APs can inform more empirically based analyses of the enacted affordances of specific technology and vice versa. These two concepts can also feed into one another during software development and research analysis processes – e.g. APs inform EAs, which similarly inform further development of APs, and so on. In this sense, APs and EAs are not separate observational lenses through which the classroom may be viewed; it is not the case that APs and EAs exist independently. Rather, they are interconnected and operate in a dynamic relationship (see the Section “Affordances for dialogue in the classroom use of a micro-blogging tool”). Such an understanding resonates with Osborne’s (2014) analysis of affordance as a design tool for aligning pedagogy and technology. This suggests how affordances can be used to ‘explain’ learning with educational technology, if the concept is broadened to include the wider ecology of learning. Specifically, Osborne proposes extending the notion of affordance in order to give agency to both learner and technology, thereby recognising the important contribution of the digital environment to the learner experience. Osborne’s approach is compatible with Hetherington and Wegerif ’s (2018) view of ‘materialdialogic intra-actions’. Applied in the context of using digital technology to support teachers’ development of dialogic pedagogy (where this is interpreted broadly to include, for instance, a teacher’s learning intention and curriculum considerations), this acknowledges how technology is not simply part of the classroom setup nor something simply employed by humans to create meaning (Cook, Warwick, Vrikki, Major, & Wegerif, 2019). A material-dialogic perspective does not view digital technology as artificially separate from the activities of the teacher and the learners; rather, it envisages a ‘voice’ for the technology within intra-actions and focuses on the meaning provided by the environment (Cook et al., 2019). An understanding of APs and EAs, therefore, appears to provide two lenses appropriate for analysing if (and how) digital technology acts as a constructive dialogue partner in enabling and constraining learning in the classroom. Given the Talkwall example discussed as follows, we note in particular how the idea of ‘affordances for dialogue’ appears to be aligned with methodological approaches such as designbased research (DBR – Brown, 1992; Barab & Squire, 2004). DBR can be used as an approach to technical as well as pedagogical development (Major, Watson, & Kimber, 2015) and aims to develop theories about domain-specific learning as well as the means that are designed to support that learning (Bakker & van Eerde, 2015). Thus, in addition to producing useful products (e.g. educational software), insights into how these can be developed and used are generated (Reeves & McKenney, 2013). An understanding of APs and EAs as interlinked ‘design princi401

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ples’ may, therefore, be used to inform external stakeholders, as well as those actively involved in a specific research and development process (relating, for instance, to the development of a particular educational technology). The interconnected nature of APs and EAs resonates with the idea that “enacted affordances are often quite different from the features imagined by the designers and can only be discovered through analysis of actual usage” (Stahl, 2007), and both will be considered in the iterative phases of design, development, and further testing that are key features of DBR. At the heart of ‘EAs’ is the question of how affordances are implicated in promoting dialogic interaction for learning, that is, in what way are affordances implicated in actual dialogic learning processes and outcomes in a specific technology context? Here we refer explicitly to how enacted affordances mediate the development of the ‘strategic knowledge’ (Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal, & Tafaghodtari, 2006) of dialogue use in collaborative interaction, leading to the development of new ideas. This is central to what we mean by ‘affordances for dialogue’. In the next section, we consider the ideas discussed previously by reflecting on empirical research involving the implementation of Talkwall.

Affordances for dialogue in the classroom use of a micro-blogging tool Influenced by the material-dialogic framework proposed by Hetherington and Wegerif (2018), in this section we consider empirical research involving the implementation of the Talkwall micro-blogging tool. We do so to exemplify the two interrelated components comprising the idea of ‘affordances for dialogue’: action possibilities and enactment. This is significant in exemplifying how the affordances associated with technology-mediated dialogue can be specifically, as well as broadly, analysed by researchers. Talkwall is one outcome of the Digitalised Dialogues Across the Curriculum project (DiDiAC)4 undertaken by researchers at the University of Oslo (Norway) and University of Cambridge (UK). Working in collaboration with nine schools, DiDiAC involved the alignment of: theories related to productive talk, a cultural-historical approach to understanding mediating technology, and a situated understanding of limitations and opportunities in the classroom (articulated by teachers during the development process). The overarching context for this work is the development of ‘21st century’ educational practices, with a focus on critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. Specifically, DiDiAC investigates how classroom dialogue is supported or modified in relation to the use of Talkwall in the naturalistic setting of the classroom. Aligned to a research-based understanding of dialogic pedagogy (exemplified through ‘Thinking Together’; Wegerif, Mercer, & Dawes, 1999), the project features collaboration between teachers, researchers, and technology experts in both Norway and the UK. Talkwall is a freely available browser-based tool designed to support classroom dialogue and interaction. Secure and local to each classroom, during a lesson involving Talkwall, a ‘main’ Talkwall is displayed at the front of the class on a projector or large screen (e.g. interactive whiteboard) and is typically controlled by the teacher; learners have their ‘own’ individual or group Talkwalls that are accessed and controlled using any device with a web browser. The teacher presents the class with a question or a challenge (also displayed at the top of each wall), before learners engage in dialogue in small groups and contribute ideas in response (using short, microblog-style messages). These contributions appear on a class ‘feed’, similar to Twitter’s timeline, which is constantly available and shared across all devices. Once posted, contributions on both teacher and student walls can be interactively sorted and arranged in a number of innovative ways.5 Following an analysis of spoken dialogue where Talkwall was in use in lessons, the development of an ‘enacted’ affordances framework was required in order to examine the various ways 402

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in which dialogue was mediated (enhanced, modified, or replaced) as students used the tool. The research team’s initial consideration of the APs related to the tool was informed by: Bower’s (2008) work on the action potentials of learning technology; research considering the influence of ICT on the interactivity of teaching and its capacity to support dialogic approaches (Beauchamp & Kennewell, 2008; Warwick et al., 2010); and the nine ‘high-level’ affordance themes identified by the scoping review. Further, we worked with Talkwall’s technical development team to determine their perspectives on various ‘built-in’ functionality intended to provide APs to support classroom dialogue. With this understanding of the broad APs that the tool might bring to a dialogic classroom environment, we then set out to examine lesson video data to ascertain the EAs evident in the actual use of the tool by students and teachers. Informed by this background analysis of APs, a first stage of affordance analysis involved four researchers independently examining video data and transcripts before collaboratively reviewing, and developing, an initial framework of emerging ideas related to Talkwall’s affordances. Following this, through a combination of inductive and deductive processes, a second stage of affordance analysis involved specifically coding for Talkwall’s ‘enacted affordances’ (or EAs – i.e. how the tool’s affordances were directly implicated in promoting dialogic interaction). Following further discussion and subsequent refinement of themes, a final framework of Talkwall’s enacted affordances was agreed for application across the dataset. Talkwall’s enacted affordances are repeatedly, and directly, implicated in the dialogic interactions that occurred in classrooms where the tool was used in combination with a dialogic pedagogy.6 Based on an analysis of 17 secondary school lessons in England during the 2016–2017 academic year, involving a total of six teachers (from each of English, science, and geography) and 138 students (aged 11–12), seven EAs relating to the use of Talkwall were identified.These affordances are applicable to both learners’ and teachers’ use of Talkwall and can be seen in Table 27.2. The strategy for determining the enacted affordances of Talkwall takes into account the wider ecology of learning (Osborne, 2014), including the ‘voice’ or role of the technology in the interaction (Cook et al., 2019). This is because, in addition to acknowledging the ‘action possibilities’ of the tool, the meaning provided by the environment is considered through analysing how Talkwall’s affordances are specifically implicated in promoting dialogic interaction for learning. In addition to intra-acting with dialogue, the identified EAs are also interconnected and interrelated, with several often ‘in play’ at the same time in a dialogic classroom environment. For instance, learners’ browsing and selecting from the Talkwall feed may be followed by creative engagement within a ‘material-dialogic space’ facilitated by the intra-action of positioning and provisionality with their dialogic co-construction of a particular concept (Cook et al., 2019). As indicated in Figure 27.1, we suggest that APs and EAs inform and feed into one another. With the example of Talkwall, classroom-based research informed the iterative design-based development of the tool. Researchers and teachers identified specific EAs relating to how the tool has actually been used in ‘dialogic classrooms’. Repeated cycles of testing and development resulted in additional APs and EAs being identified, with these used as a basis for further design and development. But of course, the majority of educational technology is not created in such a manner. With respect to ‘off-the-shelf ’ technology, APs are realised as EAs in relation to a particular pedagogy. The cyclical interaction (see Figure 27.1) occurs where, as a result of the enactment of some affordances, the teacher reviews the use of the tool to consider what further APs it has to offer in promoting the pedagogy. For example, a teacher may find that the AP of moving image objects on an iPad stimulates group dialogue in science and may then look to see how the AP of movement in a range of apps might be enacted in tasks to develop dialogue (for example, as rotation of ‘3D’ objects). 403

Table 27.2 Talkwall’s seven ‘enacted affordances’ for dialogue Enacted affordances (EAs)

Enables

Further exemplification*

Browsing

Review of Talkwall contributions (possibly with subsequent action)

The enacted affordance of browsing Talkwall’s feed facilitates exposure to other groups’ ideas in a way that widens material-dialogic space (Hetherington & Wegerif, 2018). Enactment of browsing may occur over a prolonged period, the effect of which may continue to be felt for longer than the affordance is enacted (e.g. when learners continue to discuss an idea).

Selection

Selection of Talkwall contributions (possibly as a basis for dialogue, where it is often strongly linked to elaboration and reasoning)

For example, when a learner browses the contribution feed and reads another group’s post before selecting and potentially ‘pinning’ this to their own group Talkwall, backing up their selection with a reason.

Positioning

Orientation/arranging/prioritisation of contributions in relation to task requirements (e.g. split screen). Use of hashtags (#) to categorise posts

Deepening of material-dialogic space can occur through non-verbal means as the positioning of contributions replaces dialogue. Learners’ (re)positioning of contributions with their fingers and their pointing at the screen demonstrates the corporeal nature of materialdialogic space (Wegerif & Major, 2018). Positioning of contributions affords a visual representation of the current state of learners’ shared thinking (Hennessy, 2011).

Support/ challenge

For example, when a contribution posted Group member may find support for to the Talkwall feed by another group position, or have position challenged, from is used by a learner to support what contributions posted to Talkwall rather than they are saying. from within their group

Assistive memory

Less reliance on/externalisation of working memory. Revisiting/reference back to previous contributions. A potential source of evidence

Control

For example, during a whole-class activity Deliberate manipulation by the teacher/ where the teacher has filtered the Talkwall leader to delimit or manipulate Talkwall to focus on a particular the activity. This includes the choice of wall group’s wall only, followed by the titles, backgrounds, and the ability to delete teacher asking the group to explain the other people’s posts. Includes focusing, positioning of their contributions. via magnification and filter functions, to create an object of attention (potentially for dialogue to emerge around it). May occur prior to, or after, selection and positioning.

For example, a learner revisiting a previous wall or feed to remind them of another group’s idea in order to create a new contribution on a second wall of their own. This affordance may enable dialogues to progress over time (Mercer et al., 2017).

Affordances for dialogue Provisionality

Tentative selection or positioning of items indicates possible intention, which may be modified on the basis of challenge/ dialogue. The ability to edit posts may also make a post provisional.

The enactment of provisionality can support exploratory talk as contributions may be created and placed without final commitment (Mercer et al., 2017). The intra-action between the provisional nature of positioning and the group’s exploratory talk can also enable learners to perform a creative dialogic switch (Phillipson & Wegerif, 2017). Potentially, Talkwall contributions may be viewed as dynamically constructed, easily and infinitely manipulable by teachers and learners – in readily reversible ways that support the temporary exploration of ideas (Twiner, Coffin, Littleton, & Whitelock, 2010). Like utterances (Bakhtin, 1986), they are never final or fixed but exist transiently within the dialogic space (Hennessy, 2011).

*   In part based on analyses reported in Cook et al., 2019.

We conclude this section by reflecting briefly on an idea closely related to affordance – that of ‘constraint’ (Greeno, 1994, 1998). Identifying the affordances and the constraints related to the use of an educational technology has been reported to deepen our understanding of the needs teachers naturally have and the types of solutions they deem appropriate to identified problems (Li, 2012). Kennewell (2001) writes: Constraints are not the opposite of affordances; they are complementary, and equally necessary for activity to take place. Of course, by virtue of their support for particular actions in a setting, the affordances and constraints may inhibit other actions which are more desirable. To give an example involving the use of Talkwall, it appears that the enactment of ‘browsing’, whilst affording access to a range of ideas from around the class, can also serve to inhibit exploratory talk. As detailed in Cook and colleagues (2019), where browsing was enacted, the size of the contribution feed sometimes restricted exploratory talk as the desire to address the contributions posted to Talkwall’s feed often curtailed discussions. Therefore, learning itself may be constrained. We refer interested readers to Major and colleagues (2018) for fuller consideration of the challenges and constraints that can impact on the use of digital technology in supporting classroom dialogue.

Summary The concept of ‘affordance’ appears to be significant when considering the interactions between a dialogic pedagogy and digital technology. Here, we have developed the idea of affordances of technology for dialogue to encompass two interrelated components:‘action possibilities’ (APs) and ‘enacted affordances’ (EAs) for dialogue. And we have discussed how an understanding of affordance as broad categories pertaining to a range of APs, as has traditionally often been the case, can inform more empirically based analyses of the EAs of technology as used in dialogic classrooms. 405

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It is recognised that variables such as the teacher, students, classroom organisation, resources, subject/classroom culture and norms (rules, routines, and expectations), task sequence and activity type, and technical arrangements and institutional settings (Seidel, Berente, Debortoli, & Srinivasan, 2016) will always influence what and how students learn (Kennewell, 2001). From this, it will be clear that which APs become evident as enacted affordances in the classroom, and in what form, depends too on the central variable of classroom pedagogy. It is not the technology per se that is important, therefore; it is the technology use in a particular pedagogical context (Mercer et al., 2017). Acknowledging this is central to research that seeks to understand the nature of enacted affordances in a range of settings, and it is central to the teacher, since knowing that the pedagogy is supposed to inform technology use frees them to consider not how ‘whizzy’ the technology may be but rather how it might become a ‘voice’ in teaching and learning. As our exemplification using Talkwall shows (see the Section “Affordances for dialogue in the classroom use of a micro-blogging tool”), the overarching idea of ‘affordances for dialogue’ enables a reinterpretation that may helpfully inform researchers, practitioners, and developers interested in the role of digital technology in dialogic contexts.While our approach to the analysis of Talkwall’s affordances is of course bounded by its specific context, the lessons learned are applicable more widely. The reported analytical strategy for considering affordance will hopefully prove useful to others interested in the productive use of technology in supporting dialogue and interaction in the classroom. Meanwhile, the presented framework of Talkwall’s ‘enacted affordances’ can provide a foundation for analyses in other contexts, including the use of other technology.

Notes 1 www.talkwall.net 2 For comprehensive details of the studies making up each theme and sub-theme, see Major et al., 2018. 3 Taking his analysis deeper, Osborne goes on to attribute the term ‘action possibilities’ to Heft (1989), an ecological psychologist. He also suggests that the linking of affordance and action appears to have been further embedded by Gaver, a student of Norman, in work that attempted to understand the role of affordances in regard to the design of technology (Gaver, 1991). 4 The time frame for DiDiAC is April 2016 to April 2020. The project is funded by The Research Council of Norway (FINNUT/Project No: 254761). 5 See Talkwall.net for examples of Talkwall ‘in action’. 6 Analysis of how affordances have been characterised across the dataset are not presented here, with a ‘high-level overview’ provided instead. Further methodological details are available in Cook et al., 2019.

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28 ESTABLISHING AND MAINTAINING JOINT ATTENTION IN CLASSROOM DIALOGUES Digital technology, microblogging and ground rules Ingvill Rasmussen, Anja Amundrud and Sten Ludvigsen

Introduction: collective thinking in a digital world Understanding other people’s perspectives and contributions is a key component of students’ learning in dialogic pedagogy. This skill is important for social and emotional learning, collaboration and problem solving, as well as for academic learning (Lawrence, Crosson, Pare-Blagoev, & Snow, 2015; Romeo et al., 2018; Tomasello, 2000). The precursor for such learning is joint attention—the human capacity to coordinate actions and attention with a social partner on an object (Tomasello, 1995). Joint attention is crucial for students to develop shared goals and shared understanding of specific phenomena. Without joint attention, productive participation in educational settings is difficult to achieve (Bruner, 1995; Mercer, 2013), but to create such a classroom environment requires systematic work from the teacher. This is a complex and challenging task, which demands a broad spectrum of strategies and techniques, including the use of adequate and engaging learning resources and effective classroom management (Engle & Conant, 2002; Furberg, Kluge & Ludvigsen, 2013; Seidel & Shavelson, 2007; Wang, Haertel & Walberg, 1993). Research has shown that establishing routines and procedures is central to manage complex settings such as classrooms (Mercer, Hennessy & Warwick, 2017). This takes both time and effort and constant care maintenance. Teachers have to establish clear rules and good procedures; they have to be able to manage transition between activities and learning resources, as well as to plan, organise and manage disruptions (Dawes, 2011; Emmer & Stough, 2001; Lipowsky et al., 2009). To establish and maintain joint attention in a classroom becomes even more complex with the integration of various digital technologies (Rasmussen & Ludvigsen, 2010; Mercer et al., 2017). Digital technologies can potentially support not only joint attention and engagement but

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also participation in sequential and parallel activities, which affects where teachers and students direct their attention and how they take part in activities (Dietz & Henrich, 2014; Thornton, Faires, Robbins, & Rollins, 2014; Mendoza, Pody, Lee, Kim, & McDonough, 2018). These technologies can also disrupt students’ performance on tasks requiring their full concentration (Stothart, Mitchum & Yehnert, 2015; Ward, Duke, Gneezy, & Bos, 2017). Digital technologies and infrastructures create new representational landscapes and practices, which mediate human action in ways that can have potential but also in ways that can be obstructive (Ludvigsen, 2012; Rasmussen & Ludvigsen, 2010; Säljö, 2000; Wegerif, 2007). Content can for example be represented in new ways and can positively influence students’ participation, engagement and motivation (Roblyer & Doering, 2006; Wu et al., 2012; Krange, Moen & Ludvigsen, 2012; Knain et al., 2017). Because of the rapid innovations associated with new digital technologies, continual investigation into how people interact with such tools is essential. In this chapter, we focus on how teachers support productive class dialogues in the new situations that digital technologies create. The analysis and illustrations presented point to how teachers relate to the possibilities and obstacles that the new technology presents for establishing and sustaining joint attention. Furthermore, it points out the role that creation of classroom ground rules might play to support classroom dialogues.We will review the literature on digital technology and classroom dialogues and analyse the empirical cases using microblogging. We draw on data from a research project in which teachers were encouraged to use a microblogging tool called Talkwall1 in combination with material from the ‘thinking together’ approach.2 The microblogging tool Talkwall was developed to support classroom dialogue through the use of short messages to share knowledge. By microblogging, we refer to the concept of writing short instant messages online through some sort of social network (Ebner, Lienhardt, Rohs, & Meyer, 2010; McFedries, 2007). ‘Thinking together’ is a dialogue-based approach to promote student’s awareness of the use of talk as a tool for thinking and learning (Dawes, 2011; Wegerif & Dawes, 1997; Mercer, 2013). In this approach, the creation of classroom ground rules is central to fostering the skills needed to take part in the continuous co-construction of knowledge through sharing, critiquing and gradually reconciling contrasting ideas in classroom oral discussions (Mercer, Hennessy & Warwick, 2017; Wegerif & Dawes, 2004). The idea of co-constructing knowledge also constitutes a key design feature in Talkwall, in which microblogs (short and real-time posts) can be produced collectively and/or individually and shared on a whiteboard or another large screen. These posts are used to encourage students to share, engage with and build on one another’s developing ideas. However, this public co-construction of ideas through microblogging does not happen by itself in classrooms. In this chapter, we ask what kind of interactional work that is needed to •• •• ••

achieve joint attention establish and maintain productive ground rules for classroom interaction and achieve the co-construction of knowledge

Following this, the chapter examines the role that ground rules for classroom interaction play and the work needed in technology-rich classrooms to facilitate productive classroom dialogues. The next section introduces the research literature on how to establish and sustain an efficient classroom environment and how ground rules can support this work, especially with the rapidly increasing use of digital technologies. This section is followed by one focusing on how digital technology, and microblogging in particular, can facilitate classroom dialogue.

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Joint attention and ground rules as foundations for productive classroom dialogues Joint attention is foundational for the creation of productive dialogues and co-construction of knowledge in subject domains. According to Bruner (1995), it is at its most sophisticated level a ‘meeting of minds’, which in addition to a shared focus also includes shared context and presuppositions. In technical terms, joint attention in its most simple interpretation is when two or more individuals simultaneously direct attention to the same external thing (Baldwin, 1995). However, this interpretation does not to capture the aspect of intersubjective awareness, which includes the recognition of another person’s perspective and/or ideas. In this chapter, our definition of joint attention includes this intersubjectivity. It is this awareness of simultaneous engagement that can be used as a basis for dialogue (Hagtvet & Heen Wold, 2003; Linell, 2009; Bruner, 1995). Studies find that many students struggle to understand the norms guiding productive classroom dialogue, collaboration and problem solving (OECD, 2017; Rasmussen & Ludvigsen, 2010). Furthermore, digital technologies add complexity, so if students are to master productive dialogues in collaborative situations with digital tools, strategies for collaboration and problem solving must be made explicit and modelled. These are strategies involving both cognitive and social regulation (Hesse, Care, Buder, Sassenberg, & Griffin, 2015; Ludvigsen, Cress, Law, Stahl, & Rosé, 2018). Mercer and colleagues have argued for decades that it is important to jointly establish ground rules for talk to facilitate productive classroom dialogue and collaboration (Dawes, 2011; Edwards & Mercer, 1987; Mercer, 2004; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Mercer, Wegerif & Dawes, 1999; Wegerif & Dawes, 2004). Ground rules are essential tools that humans create to manage situations and interactions (Mercer, 2013). They are developed interactively in local cultures or subcultures and represent what is acceptable and what is not (Sacks, 1992). For example, in schools, teachers have identifiable professional strategies to guide their students towards appropriate ways of carrying out work within the subject domain they teach (Edwards & Mercer, 1987). Ground rules may be seen as situated strategies aligned with the institutional context, resources and domain knowledge. Studies in various countries have in fact shown that jointly establishing ground rules improves the quality of discussions, collaboration and problemsolving skills for students (Kleine Staarman, 2009; Rojas-Drummond, Pérez, Vélez, Gómez, & Mendoza, 2003). Mercer and Littleton (2007) argue that ground rules are effective tools because such rules connect students’ discussions with their cognitive activities. However, simply creating and presenting ground rules does not mean students will start to follow them. Ground rules must be learned to become part of the enacted social and cultural repertoire in the classroom, and teachers must maintain their relevance by modelling how the rules should be applied and by integrating them with tasks in a meaningful way (Dawes, 2011; Kleine Staarman, 2009). Furthermore, these ground rules should always reflect the classroom environment in which they are established and developed. Digital technology in classrooms can change the nature of the communication and the collaboration processes, and situations in which the ground rules are ambiguous can occur. Communication mediated through computers or other digital devices encourages a new genre that includes both written and spoken modes of communicating. This is a genre that most teachers and students are familiar with, though from different social contexts. For this reason, both teachers and students may draw on other types of ground rules than those that are productive in education as a mechanism for improved interaction, i.e. from other social media platforms (Lantz-Andersson, Vigmo & Bowen, 2013). An essential part of introducing new technology into the classroom context is, therefore, establishing ground rules that 413

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are adapted to the new communicative situation (Kleine Staarman, 2009; Wertsch, 1998). Thus, new ground rules for how to productively handle and engage with new technologies as partners in creating dialogues in the classroom context should receive more attention and empirical investigation.

Facilitating classroom dialogue through digital technology and microblogging Any new cultural tool provides both new benefits but also introduces new challenges. This duality pointed out by Wertsch (1998) is reflected in empirical studies on classroom dialogue and digital technology (Jeong & Hmelo-Silver, 2016; Major, Warwick, Rasmussen, Ludvigsen, & Cook, 2018). On the one hand, various digital technologies can support students in coconstructing knowledge and can encourage dialogic critique of ideas through the creation and manipulation of objects (Hennessy, 2011; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014). External representations on large screens are useful in this process for grounding and sustaining attention, for prompting and directing participation and for visualising ideas (Gillen, Kleine Staarman, Littleton, Mercer, & Twiner, 2007; Hennessy & Warwick, 2010). On the other hand, the presence of technologies in classrooms also results in frustration; teachers complain that students disappear into a separate world instead of engaging with the ongoing learning activities (Lund & Rasmussen, 2008; Rasmussen, Lund & Smørdal, 2012). Small devices like an iPad or a mobile phone used in the classroom can be a useful tool to facilitate the students’ school work, but they can also act as a distraction, making the integration of such devices in a classroom challenging (Ott, Magnusson, Weilenmann, & af Segerstad, 2018; Anshari, Almunawar, Shahrill, Wicaksono, & Huda, 2017). Microblogging includes services like instant messaging, chats and various social media sites, which have created opportunities for dialogue that is digital or a mix of digital and face-to-face. Such services have become central in both private and public communication. The opportunities these technologies provide for teachers to gain insight into the discussions of student groups and to represent those discussions for whole-class conversations have been noted (LantzAndersson, 2016; Mercier, Rattray & Lavery, 2015). Although microblogging in education is relatively recent, the few studies that do exist indicate that the short format is productive for starting conversations (Gao, Luo & Zhang, 2012) and for making thinking visible through tangible artefacts (Mercier et al., 2015); it can also be used to explore and bring new information into the conversations (Thoms, 2012). Other benefits of microblogging include allowing instant feedback and comments to the ongoing instructional/lesson activities (Li & Greenhow, 2015; Luo, 2015). The use of Twitter has also been reported to increase on-task talk, the ability to redirect discussions during the activity and the ability to use the shared representation of tweets to direct final whole-class conversations, which allow for more concrete discussions (Mercier et al., 2015). In our own work, we found connections between an increase in subject attainment and the content displayed in microblogs on a shared screen, combined with the students’ and the teacher’s own dialogic elaborations of that content (Rasmussen & Hagen, 2015). As such, the microblogs and the shared screens represented an interface for creating joint attention.This type of technology can open up the possibility for each student to make his or her thinking visible and for the teacher to engage with the students individually and collectively in order to expand the ‘dialogic space’ for learning (Wegerif, 2007). To summarise, the research literature reviewed draws attention to the fact that classrooms are complex social areas that require management skills and that jointly established ground rules for

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how to talk and work together facilitate productive student participation in classroom dialogue. Furthermore, the complexity of the classroom environment increases when digital devices are brought in; the research shows that the use of digital technology can support communication and participation. In the next section, we present our data and analytical approach, which are a part of a research project called Digital Dialogues across the Curriculum (DiDiAC).

Data and analytical approach The DiDiAC project has a design-based approach (DBR), in which collaboration between teachers, researchers and technology developers is central (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012; Barab & Squire, 2004; Krange & Ludvigsen, 2009). As Figure 28.1 illustrates, four workshops and three lessons of each teacher were recorded. We met with the teachers to discuss their experience between the recorded lessons. The teachers were encouraged to use the ‘thinking together’ material and to experiment with Talkwall as a means to support the development of a dialogic classroom culture. The teachers were introduced to the rationale behind a dialogic pedagogy and how to develop and sustain the communicative norms, referred to as ground rules, from which productive talk emerges. The workshops also included group discussions and practical exercises. The project involves teachers and their students (ages 11–13) from four schools in Norway (teachers N = 15, students N = 250) and two in the UK (teachers N = 6, students N = 123). In this chapter, we draw on video data from classroom situations, audio recordings of interviews, classroom observations and logs from Talkwall. We present data from one of the teachers and her primary school class, which illustrate key features concerning the work performed to establish and maintain joint attention in classroom oral discussions and the role that digital technology and ground rules play in this work. Central to the analysis presented is the movement ‘back and forth between the emerging theory and detailed analyses of data, making revisions of both’ (Engle, Langer-Osuna & de Royston, 2014 p. 247). In the socio-cultural stance adopted in this study, the irreducible unit of analysis is mediated action (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertch, 1991; Säljö, 2009). Thus, our analysis describes how talk emerges in a series of actions by following the content and interactional moves. The aim is to provide an in-depth understanding that results in new insights into the micro-dynamics of interactional work needed to learn (Engle, Conant & Greeno, 2007; Erickson, 1985; 2004;Yin, 2003; Derry et al., 2010). To corroborate our argument, we discuss our analysis in relation to the larger database and literature in the discussion section.

Figure 28.1 This figure represents teacher–researcher collaboration over one year.

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Ground rules and new educational technology The analysis and illustrations presented in this section point to how teachers relate to the possibilities and obstacles that new technology presents and the role that ground rules may play as a support.

Joint attention in technology rich settings: ground rules and transitions between activities The first example addresses a type of interactional work that teachers do on a daily basis but that is not often attended to in educational research—transitioning from one activity to another. These are very typical situations in educational settings, and teachers have many different strategies to handle such situations—whether it involves getting the students to transition from group work to a class activity or simply turning to the next page in their textbooks. However, such transitions can be particularly difficult in technology-rich classrooms. In the following example, we report the strategies teachers have developed to overcome the obstacles that technology poses.The example in Figure 28.2 displays a transition from a group discussion to a whole class session. The students are in groups of three gathered around one shared iPad. The teacher walks around the classroom while verbally asking the students to attend to her with their ‘eyes and ears’. From our recorded observations, we see that most students looked at the iPad screens. The teacher walks to the front of the classroom and continues as the illustration in Figure 28.2 narrates. The pictures sequentially illustrate how the students followed the teacher’s instructions. The teacher reminds the students that when the screen is facing upwards, this may make it more difficult to pay attention and recommends turning it down with the ‘apple facing up’. The phrase ‘apple facing up’ was repeated several times.

Figure 28.2 Transitions in technology-rich classrooms.

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The interactional work necessary for 28 students to shift from one activity to another does not happen by itself. Such shifts need assistance, and teachers must know how to perform such interactional work. Figure 28.2 shows strategies that one teacher employed to successfully facilitate such a shift. Note that there is not only one instructional activity performed but a set of verbal and non-verbal cues, which emphasise that a transition is occurring.The phrases ‘eyes and ears’ and ‘apple facing up’ were commonly used as prompts in this class. The teacher also moved around the room to attend to all the students and used her arms to indicate the actions needed to put the iPad screen down. Other teachers used other prompts or cues that were verbal and/ or movement-based, such as clapping a rhythm, counting down (3, 2, 1) or using signs.

Co- construction: developing and sustaining the ground rules Accessing one another’s thoughts is fundamental for ‘thinking together’ and co-construction (Mercer, 2013; Linell, 2009). In Talkwall, short written texts can be produced either collectively or individually; they are always accessible through a ‘feed’. To illustrate how Talkwall can facilitate students’ co-construction, we provide an illustration of work done by one teacher to transform the ground rules into tools that the students can follow.The data illustrate how this teacher used Talkwall when referring back to a previous lesson, in which the students had talked about the difficulties they experienced when they were asked to come to an agreement as a group. Teacher:‘Last time when we used Talkwall, we focused on what’s important to remember when we want to come to an agreement—and when we talk together in a group (…) . And then we made blogs with advice. Look at this!’ (The teacher points to Talkwall where the students’ blogs, which were written previously, are shown). As a reminder, the teacher brought back and displayed ‘the wall’ that the students had made in the previous lesson (see Figure 28.3). The wall contained blogs with the students’ own advice on how to overcome obstacles to reaching group consensus. The teacher enthusiastically read their contributions out loud and then reminded the students that these are important pieces of advice to

Figure 28.3 Advice on how to follow ground rules.

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f­ollow in the upcoming discussion task. By doing so, the teacher recognised their work as important and created a space for the students’ own perspectives in the form of their written contributions.The list represented the students’ accounts of what may help when faced with the challenge of having to agree as a group. It is interesting to note the metalinguistic character of the students’ advice, such as the fact that sitting closer together and putting away distracting things will help group communication. Also, the task created by this teacher represents a creative extension of the resources provided in the ‘thinking together’ material as a way of experimenting with a new digital tool (Talkwall). It takes time to create such additional tasks that help students create new learning strategies by appropriating the norms of agreeing and listening. The extent to which this type of creative work was done varied among the teachers that took part in this project. The data illustrate how the teacher made the class discussion a productive common source of knowledge for the students by using the technology´s ability to display student work. Talkwall assisted the teacher in reporting back the students’ work done in groups to the class. The display of the blogs also supported the oral discussion because the students had the technology to look at while speaking. Talk is fluid, and the materiality of Talkwall provided support for the students’ public co-construction of ideas. As mentioned, the ground rule emphasised in this lesson was ‘to come to an agreement as a group’; other lessons were guided by other rules, such as ‘being an active listener’. The latter ground rule was found in many classrooms and seemed to be commonly recognised as important for the students to work well together. Listening is essential to build on one another’s contributions. However, being an active listener is not simple.Talk is fluid, and attending to others in settings where a lot of things are going on at once, as is the case in technology-rich classrooms, presents additional challenges. In our case, the blogs represented the student’s voices on ‘the wall’, and the presence of the blogs seemed to facilitate sharing and co-construction. The work the teacher does in this lesson demonstrates how the ground rules foster dialogue and collaboration. In both the discussions and the microblogs, the students get the opportunity to show one another how knowledge can be developed through group elaboration and reasoning.Teacher and student interviews confirm that the students are more aware of the importance of listening and attending to one another’s ideas now than before the intervention. Several of the students point out that they listen more carefully to one another and that the other students did the same. In analysing our recorded lessons and the interviews of teachers and students, we found that all the teachers (with one exception) had developed local ground rules with their classes. The students were given the task to collectively agree upon a set of rules that they believed to be important for inclusive and reasoned class discussions. Although the classes arrived at their own set of rules independently, there was still a strong sense of coherence across the classes. Ground rules like ‘everyone should give reasons’, ‘you should look and listen to the person who is speaking’ and ‘everyone should strive for agreement’ are examples of regular ones. However, the extent to which these rules were explicitly sustained in the 35 research lessons recorded in the DiDiAC project varied considerably, and there were large differences regarding the work done by the teachers to make the rules relevant for solving tasks and if they prioritised the extra work needed to sustain and develop the ground rules further in their classes. In the interviews, some of the teachers said that the ground rules worked efficiently when they focused on them and that they would continue with this type of facilitation work; others said that they wished they had done more work to make the ground rules relevant for the students. The students generally reported that the ground rules were useful and that the teachers sometimes focused on them. Several said that the rules had made a difference in the classroom interactions and that they thought this was positive. At the same time, the students as well as the teachers pointed to the fact that the rules were easily forgotten when they were not reminded of them. 418

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Discussion and conclusion: the extra work that technology requires Classroom management is central for student learning because when it is done effectively, it increases time for academic interaction between teachers and students (Engle et al., 2007; Seidel & Shavelson, 2007; Wang et al., 1993). However, there is a difference between classroom management and the facilitation of productive classroom dialogues. Meta-talk (talk about how to talk together) assisted the students in how to do classroom dialogues. The second example illustrates the students’ process of adapting the ground rules into tools that they could follow and practising their group work skills. The task integrated the use of Talkwall as a placeholder for the students to share advice, and it recognised that coming to an agreement as a group may be challenging. In this case, the digital tool assisted the process of creating continuity and a sense of community. Talkwall provides a shared and visible memory structure that can be turned into a resource for co-construction of knowledge and learning. Talkwall (and other similar technologies) can make it possible to create a learning trajectory in which students can follow their own and their peers’ contribution over time. Talk between students and teachers is concerned with norms and content that become mediated by different digital representations. Teachers need a repertoire of strategies to create productive classroom oral discussions. This repertoire is in constant development on a personal level as well as on a social and cultural level. Establishing and maintaining joint attention on the topic at hand and creating a classroom culture that encourages all students to partake in discussions are central for all teachers. Strategies such as those described in the two empirical examples can be integrated into classrooms to enhance the cultural repertoire of the teaching and learning activities with the use of digital technologies. Even though joint attention is a vital skill, the transformational potential of digital technology in this area has received less theoretical interest and few empirical investigations. As noted in the literature section, establishing class ground rules has shown positive results for the development of a dialogic classroom culture. The aims of this chapter were to examine how the ground rules for classroom interaction are transformed due to the integration of digital technologies and the interactional work that teachers perform. The first example demonstrates the extra work that teachers must do once technologies enter their classrooms. New cultural tools like Talkwall and other educational technology have features that can free teachers and students from earlier limitations, but, at the same time, they introduce new ones (Major, Haßler, & Hennessy, 2017; Rasmussen & Ludvigsen, 2010). Thus, new routines need to be established in order to create joint attention. This chapter has examined how ground rules for classroom interaction operate and are further transformed, as well as the interactional work needed in technology-rich classrooms to facilitate these shifts. As such, the empirical material displays some of the most important aspects of the intensification that technology entails in practice. Lessons with variation and shifts between learning activities create more student engagement. Technology can facilitate variation and activity shifts, but this is also a cost to the teacher if he or she does not know how to manage it. Research has demonstrated that digital tools and environments have the potential to support ‘thinking together’ and the co-construction of ideas (e.g. de Jong & Jules, 2005; Linn & Eylon, 2011; Wegerif, 2007; Mercer, 2013). The co-construction of knowledge is a key design feature in Talkwall and can be carried out in several ways. Microblogs, for example, can be copied and added to, and text can be sorted with hashtags. Features such as these are common across social media platforms and make the participants’ process of developing ideas visible. However, such a public co-construction process may make students feel vulnerable. Attending to the ground rules that govern the social interaction is, therefore, central because they tell us what counts as 419

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appropriate in that setting (Kleine Staarman, 2009; Ludvigsen, 2012). Students also need to learn how to productively take part in dialogues mediated by social media. The examples demonstrate how the teacher models strategies for productive participation by making available what counted as skills and knowledge in her classroom.The process of appropriating ground rules played a central role. Importantly, the idea of ground rules is not about making sure the students follow specific rules but rather about developing cultural tools and resources that students need in order to participate in productive dialogues (Edwards & Mercer, 1987; RojasDrummond & Mercer, 2003;Wegerif & Dawes, 2004). In our analysis of the recorded lessons and interviews of teachers and students, we found examples of teachers encouraging and extending their students’ contributions to the public co-construction of a subject. In the created ground rules, there were also several examples that attended to the importance of being an ‘active listener’. As pointed out by Linell (2009), ‘Responsive understanding is a fundamental force’ so listening and recognising what other participants contribute is central in establishing joint attention. If teachers have not attended to their students and tried to understand their contributions to a discussion, then they will not be able to build on their students’ knowledge. The opportunity to build on both students’ talk and writing displayed on the ‘wall’ expanded the teachers’ opportunities for coconstruction of knowledge in this type of classroom dialogue. Collaboration and co-construction can be challenging and when linked to academic tasks in digital learning environments, the complexity only increases (Furberg et al., 2013). Students’ learning is not sequentially organised by a textbook as often as before, which means that they must navigate and integrate knowledge from different informational resources (Gilje et al., 2016).This form of cognitive integration is very demanding (Bråten & Braasch, 2017; Ludvigsen, 2009), and there are important insights to be gained from focusing on the kinds of interactional supports needed for leaners to successfully interpret the tasks and materials used. This chapter has shown examples of the kinds of new norms and ground rules for how to engage with technologies as partners in classroom dialogues. New technology may change the nature of the communicative and collaborative processes in classrooms; it is, therefore, important to know what the mechanisms and dynamics of interactional processes are in order to understand how learning processes are changing with new educational technologies. Educational research needs to attend to these interactional mechanisms because they are foundational to the higher level of cognitive work that academic learning requires.

Acknowledgements This work was funded by the Research Council of Norway [FINNUT/Project No: 254761].

Notes 1 www.talkwall.net 2 https://thinkingtogether.educ.cam.ac.uk

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29 DESIGNING A DIALOGIC TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED PEDAGOGY TO SUPPORT COLLABORATIVE CREATIVITY Manoli Pifarré

Introduction Recent educational research has revealed the importance of the dialogic technology-enhanced pedagogy for supporting classroom dialogue, thinking and learning (Henessy, 2011; Hennessy, Deaney, Ruthven, & Winterbottom, 2007; Mercer, Hennessy & Warwick, 2017). Such research also highlights that technology must be embedded in well-designed classroom activities to promote collective thinking. Likewise, evidence gathered from interventional school-based studies using a dialogic pedagogy confirms the challenges of transferring research findings into reallife classroom settings (Major, Warwick, Rasmussen, Ludvigsen, & Cook, 2018). This suggests the need to establish joint collaboration between teachers and researchers in order to design a dialogic pedagogy that could help teachers go through and complete their syllabus along with achieving a more interactive and dialogic atmosphere in the classroom. This chapter falls within the scope of this line of research and describes a dialogic technology-enhanced pedagogy to promote collaborative creativity. This pedagogy has been elaborated by both researchers and teachers and has been implemented and evaluated through a series of classroom-based projects (Del Barrio, Guiral, Pifarré, & Font, 2018; Pifarré, Huix, Isern, Martí, & Roures, 2017). Collaborative work between researchers and teachers is essential in better understanding the theoretical underpinnings of dialogic teaching and learning processes (Mercer et al., 2017). On the other hand, all the classroom-based projects have a consistent format and have embedded the same key teaching and learning dimensions as explained in the next sections. The chapter is organised as follows: first, I will describe the theoretical vantage points underpinning the pedagogical framework presented in this chapter. Second, there is an outline of a technology-enhanced dialogic pedagogy to promote collaborative creativity illustrated with examples from one of the classroom projects. I will finally draw the main conclusions and ideas developed in the chapter.

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Theoretical vantage dimensions for promoting collaborative creativity in the classroom Collaborative creativity as a social process Creativity has been defined as an imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value (Kampylis & Valtanen, 2010). Loveness (2007) confirms that this definition is a helpful framework for educators because it expresses five characteristics (i.e. using imagination; being a fashioning process; pursuing purpose; being original and judging value) that can encompass learning to be creative with value to individuals, peers and society. There is growing interest in creativity as a social and situated phenomenon (Glǎveanu, 2010; Plucker, Beghetto & Dow, 2004) in which the aforementioned creativity characteristics are developed as part of a social process, within a group whose participants are immersed in a joint activity and, by so doing, generate new or alternative ways of solving a collective problem, and the product created in collaboration is novel and has a value at the community level (Hämäläinen & Vähäsantanen, 2011). Therefore, the collaborative creative processes and output must be new and useful for a group or wider community. When referring to the promotion of collaborative creativity processes in the classroom, researchers have used the metaphor of middle-c creativity (Eteläpelto & Lahti, 2008; Moran, 2010) which consists of situated interaction processes among the members of a small community – e.g. the classroom – and shared knowledge construction that enables new creative processes, outputs or solutions to common problems. In contrast to this, the metaphor little-c creativity (Craft, 2010) is used when speaking of creativity at individual level. It refers to new understandings, ideas or products created by a person, and this output is significant to the individual itself but not necessarily to other people. Finally, big-c creativity refers to culturally, socially and universally new products.

The role of dialogue in promoting collaborative creativity The acceptance of the social nature of creativity has raised an interest in identifying the characteristics of the dialogue and the dialogic space of a joint activity and relationship that promotes seeing and feeling things from a new perspective (Harvey, 2013; Wegerif, 2010). A dialogic approach to collaborative creativity is understood as engaging students in sustained stretches of talk which enable speakers and listeners to explore and build on their own and others’ creative ideas and new perspectives to emerge from the interplay of voices (Alexander, 2017; Wegerif, 2010). From this perspective, creative thinking is learnt in the context of a dialogic space characterised by joint interactions, intersubjective orientations and rich and reflective dialogues (Glăveanu, Gillespie & Karwowski, 2018; Wegerif et al., 2010). Some researchers have identified several characteristics of co-creative dialogues. These characteristics can be summarised in the following five points: a) real open-ended and situated dialogues; b) open-mindedness; c) holding different perspectives and multiple voices; d) collaborative creative strategies and e) togetherness (Palmgren-Neuvonen, Korkeamäki & Littleton, 2017;Vass, Littleton, Jones, & Miell, 2014; Wegerif et al., 2010). These characteristics are further described as follows. a) Open-ended and situated dialogues Grounded in Bakhtin’s (1986) ideas, Wegerif and colleagues (2010) claim that a dialogic approach to creativity begins with open-ended and situated dialogues with no forehand direction, and the meaning that flows in the dialogue depends on the tension between the different 426

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perspectives at play. The design of middle-c creative activities can contribute to promoting open-ended creative dialogues inasmuch as they push students to solve creatively a challenge relevant for a community of people. In doing so, students would be engaged and collaborate with others in a small community of people to, eventually, solve wide-ranging social group challenges. After all, in peer-group communities, creativity emerges within dynamic processes of collaboration and co-construction that lead to new solutions to the same issues. b) Open-mindedness Open-mindedness and openness to otherness is another characteristic of co-creative dialogues. In an attempt to develop the concept of dialogic open-mindedness, Wegerif et al. (2017) claim that this concept includes cognitive openness to new information and active processing of this information in a coherent identity and the ability to partially inhabit the positions and feelings of others. In this vein, recent experimental studies claim that the perspective taken is one of the key indicators to explain the emergence of original ideas in dyads (Glăveanu et al., 2018; Harvey, 2013). c) Holding different perspectives and multiple voices A key component of the dialogic learning theory is the gap between voices in a dialogue in which various voices interact with each other (Wegerif, 2007). The capacity of holding different perspectives together in tension is viewed as a resource leading to the emergence of new positions. Different educational researches have already studied the effect of group diversity on divergent and convergent creativity in groups (e.g. Muira & Hida, 2004; Rietzschel, Nijstad & Stroebe, 2010). Group members’ diversity in those characteristics which are closely linked to underlying differences in perspective (e.g. group members’ educational background, previous experience in the common task or cultural diversity) have been associated with more innovations, the generation of higher quality ideas and the selection of a set of original ideas.Therefore, incorporating multiple voices into the dialogue and learning from the creative tension between them is a key aspect for promoting collaborative creativity processes. d) Collaborative creative strategies Different strategies have been identified that help group members play and incorporate other group members’ ideas and facilitate the emergence of a new perspective or a new way of seeing the problem. In this line, numerous researchers (Harvey, 2013; Howes et al., 2015; Kohn, Paulus & Choi, 2011) conclude that different perspectives emerge in a group when participants display the following three creative strategies: a) building on ideas; b) combining ideas and c) reflecting and evaluating ideas in a cycle that creativity researchers have named the “balloon cycle”. This cycle represents two iterative steps: one expanding stage of divergent inter-thinking, whereby different possibilities are generated, followed by convergent inter-thinking into a more reduced set of ideas. On the one hand, the strategy of building on another group member’s idea involves recognising his/her idea as promising and selecting it for further elaboration. Research has identified that building up on others’ ideas is supported by co-constructive talk typically referring to chaining, integrating, elaborating or reformulating each other’s contributions to create meaning (Palmgren-Neuvonen et al., 2017; Rojas-Drummond, Albarrán & Littleton, 2008). On the other hand, the strategy of combining ideas includes recognising the similarity between different ideas, abstracting a broader concept and integrating the ideas into a new conceptualisation; all 427

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these actions create something new. In the same vein, Thagard and Stewart (2011) claim that creativity insights come from novel combinations of representations. Finally, the social evaluation of some ideas is another key strategy that distinguishes multi-voiced and creative dialogue. Social evaluation of an idea demands from its originator to give further justification and exemplification of its value. In turn, these new arguments enrich the dialogue among the members of the group (Glăveanu et al., 2018). In the same spirit, Hao et al. (2016) conclude that generation and evaluation of ideas alternate during creative processes and that evaluation of ideas has positive effects on the group’s creative outcome. Exploratory talk (Wegerif & Mercer, 2002) supports the combination and evaluation of ideas because this type of talk involves partners engaging critically but constructively with each other’s ideas, and explicit reasoning in the form of arguments and counter-arguments is made visible (Harvey, 2013; Palmgren-Neuvonen et al., 2017; Vass et al., 2014). e) Togetherness The development of trust in each other at the emotional, social and cognitive level is crucial in co-creation (Thagard & Stewart, 2011; Vass & Deszpot, 2017). However, trust-building processes can be a challenging issue in diverse groups. Research has already informed that diverse groups tend to have lower cohesion, less motivation to work together and more interpersonal conflict (Mannix & Neale, 2005). Therefore, trust-building processes should be promoted in co-creative dialogues. In this respect, Wegerif (2005) observes that playful talk is important in fostering cohesion and joint meaning-making in co-creative situations because playful talk involves making verbal puns and imaginative associations with words (Wegerif, 2005). Shared embodied responses among peers can enhance the development of trust, emotional creative attunement (Vass et al., 2014), group flow (Sawyer, 2012) or multimodal interaction and communication (Sakr, 2018). Therefore, it is argued that, when studying collaborative creativity, one should look at how students are engaged in a wide range of modes of interaction including gaze, facial expressions, body orientation, movement, gesture and touch (Sakr, 2018;Vass et al., 2014).

Affordances of interactive technologies to support collaborative creativity processes In 21st century society, technology plays a relevant role in our daily actions and has a strong impact on humans’ behaviour (e.g. consumption, leisure and work).The latest advances in interactive technology development have materialised the idea of humans connected with others, sharing their ideas in open-digitalised spaces, interplaying with others’ voices expressed through different multimodal channels and co-creating knowledge through on-line interaction. In this context, digital technology is viewed as an excellent means of promoting dialogic education and creativity because it has affordances to open up, widen and deepen learners’ opportunities to generate, modify and reflect on new ideas through multimodal interaction along with talk (Hennessy, 2011; Wegerif & Mansour, 2010). Technology can play an important role in mediating students’ actions and dialogue and accomplishing a learning task. Technology, as other novel tools and artefacts, can change social activities and modify the ways of thinking and engaging in meaning-making and knowledge-creation (Säljö, 2002).We think with and through artefacts that constitute mediational means with particular affordances and constraints (Mercer et al., 2017). Research has already characterised distinct features of interactive technology that can play a role in promoting and shaping co-creative dialogues (Hennessy, 2011; Loveless; 2007; Rogers & Lindley, 2004; Sakr, 2018). Both teachers and students 428

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may exploit the following features of interactive technologies that can lead to new ways of thinking creatively together and enrich their co-creative processes repertoire (Sawyer, 2013). a) Accessibility to others’ ideas. The latest and manifold advances in open access software design enable easy creation and access to multi-user shared spaces. Students have thus the opportunity to watch, join in, apply and imitate other members’ creative processes and in doing so, improve their repertoire of collective creative processes. b) Connectivity. Schools and public institutions have upgraded their facilities to enable connectivity via internet or Wi-Fi connection in all the classrooms. c) Visibility of all group members and actions. New interactive technologies enable visibility of all the actions made in a shared space for all the group members. This feature can help maintain a simultaneous focus of attention on shared ideas and artefacts. Rasmussen, Amundrud and Ludgvigsen (2019, in this volume) state that technology can support the visualisation of “interthinking” and promote students’ joint attention. According to Rasmussen et al., joint attention, understood as the human capacity to coordinate actions and attention with a social partner on an object, is the precursor for learning to understand other people’s perspectives and contributions. d) Interactivity and immediate responsiveness to others’ ideas and contributions. Interactivity can engage users at different levels, such as getting feedback on decisions made or monitoring the common space. Besides, interactivity can enhance the immediate responsiveness to others’ ideas and contributions which widen communication among peers. e) Tangibility and direct manipulation of a shared artefact that can aid the development of joint meaning-making and joint insights. Students can make explicit inferencing and reasoning processes from tangible information which can resource and widen dialogues. Also students’ thinking is translated into physical objects that can be used as referential anchors for their discussions (Mercer et al., 2017) and can actively develop, share and reformulate joint meanings. f) Multimodal representation of ideas and complex concepts can make it easier to share, discuss, visualise and understand. Furthermore, these multimodal representations can be thoughtprovoking because they can lead to deepening and widening comprehension of shared ideas. g) Provisionality, as all the actions done using technology can be modified and continued by building on an evolving shared artefact.This feature can promote the “if-thinking” (Craft, 2000) because students can interplay with their ideas and voices through possible paths as well as change and go back to previous proposals. Besides, the provisional placing of ideas can articulate reasoning without a final commitment and, in so doing, widen the dialogue. h) Stability, as all the actions done using technology are stable because they can be stored. The different ideas can be maintained and enable users to read, interrogate, interpret, analyse and synthesise information at higher levels. i) Re-usability and re-visitation across time. Interactive technologies allow saving, revisiting and repurposing the co-constructed artefacts at a later time. Mercer and colleagues (2017) claim that these artefacts render both common learning histories and trajectories more visible and help dialogues to be constructed cumulatively and in progression over time. The aforementioned features of interactivity may enable the creation of a tangible dialogic space (Wegerif, 2007) to foster creative thinking and collective knowledge building.The dialogic space can embody physical action (through direct and visible manipulations), cognitive representations (through the construction of shared digital knowledge artefacts) and socio-emotional relationships (through multimodal shared experiences) (Pifarré, in press). Furthermore, this multifaceted dialogic space is co-built using, simultaneously, different modes of communication (e.g. oral, gesture, written) and multiple symbolic languages (e.g. pictures, graphs). Research has already shown that this multifaceted and multimodal co-created dialogic space can support learners’ opportunities engagement in a high-quality interaction that can have a 429

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positive impact on students’ learning. For example, the review of Major and colleagues (2018) indicates that productive classroom dialogue can be enhanced by using digital technology through: a) exposing learners to different perspectives; b) supporting students to build knowledge together; c) enhancing metacognitive learning and d) increasing the sense of community. Specifically, in the dialogic technology-enhanced pedagogy presented in this chapter, four dialogic uses of technology were intensified in order to support the emergence of salient co-creative processes. First, students were encouraged to revisit and re-use the records of previous group work and information as an updating source of reference for new connections and development of new ideas (Hennessy, 2011; Kennewell & Beauchamp, 2007).This use of technology may contribute to the students’ development of cumulative dialogue for co-creation. Second, interactivity and visibility of each other’s thoughts as tangible objects in the shared space were promoted in order to enhance collaboration from all group members and their contribution in developing multi-voiced new ideas. Third, in an attempt to help all group members to make new connections explicit, we encouraged direct manipulation of each other’s ideas in a provisional and easily editable manner. Finally, multiple multimodal representations of ideas were also encouraged in a way that could feed students’ dialogue with explicit and tangible reasons for their ideas. All the previous could therefore stimulate the creation of more concrete, insightful and reflective dialogues that could widen and deepen students’ understanding of each other’s ideas.

Establishing a dialogic technology-enhanced pedagogy for collaborative creativity The design of our pedagogical framework followed the concept of “orchestrating learning” (Brown, 1992). Recently, along with the complexity of knowledge age competences, this concept has been extended to supporting creative collaboration (Hämäläinen & Vähäsantanen, 2011). One of the main principles for orchestrating learning processes is the necessity to combine and find a balance in educational settings between designing or structuring creative and collaborative processes (e.g. Dillenbourg & Tchounikine, 2007), and improvising or using other similar perspectives that emphasise freedom (Sawyer, 2004). This dialogic technology-enhanced pedagogy orchestrates the following three educational dimensions, namely: a) creation of a dialogic space for thinking creatively together; b) dialogic use of interactive technologies and c) enrichment and orchestration of creative processes and group flow. These three dimensions and their components are graphically depicted in Figure 29.1 and further explained as follows.

The creation of a dialogic space for thinking and creating together The creation of a dialogic space for thinking and creating together started with considering the classroom and the school as a small-community context capable of engaging students in solving a social, real open-ended challenge with a strong significance for the school. As an illustration, one of the schools planned an interdisciplinary project and, funnily enough, the challenge came from the environmental school committee. The challenge consisted of outlining a design of a new decoration for one of the walls in the school playground. The design included a written explanation about the rationale behind it, the materials proposed and its budget. This challenge aimed to raise awareness from the whole school community on the importance of being environmentally friendly. The challenging solution should be then presented orally to a wider audience, made up of the school’s environmental committee including delegates of teachers and students. 430

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DIALOGIC SPACE ACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES INTER

Multi-voiced

Re-usability

Connectivity Visibility

Togetherness

E PROCESSES CREATIV

Accessibility

Creative Challenge Solution

Social Challenge Divergent

Interactivity Holding different Responsiveness perspectives

Exploration

Re-visit Stability

Convergent Provisional

Direct manipulation

Multimodal representation

Openmindness

Tangibility

Thinking together

Multi-level dialogue

Figure 29.1 Graphical representation of the educational dimensions and components of the proposed dialogic technology-enhanced pedagogy for collaborative creativity.

The starting point of this co-creative project is therefore a real-world challenge from students within a local environment. This social and real challenge may promote students’ engagement in an open and real dialogic space in which they can bring in other embodied voices in the form of their own experience and knowledge from outside of the classroom or others’ needs, views, attitudes or feelings. The meeting point or the outcome to this challenge is the creation and communication of a product which has to be a novel and valuable solution for the local community. Consequently, the process of planning and elaborating a co-creative solution for a social challenge can create a favourable environment for students to establish a dialogic space for thinking creatively together. During the process of solving the proposed challenge, the students’ engagement in a dialogic space for thinking and creating together was enhanced through the orchestration of the next four design features, namely: Thinking Together approach

Throughout the project, various activities based on a dialogic theory (Wegerif, 2013) and on the Thinking Together approach (Dawes & Sams, 2004; Mercer & Littleton, 2007) were embedded, whereby students were encouraged to set up, reflect and evaluate ground rules for effective communication of ideas in a collaborative situation. These activities were mediated by technology and students could record and re-visit their ground rules agreements. As can be seen in Figure 29.1, in three occasions students were encouraged to reflect and report about their small-group interaction and work. The promotion of multi-levels of dialogue

The pedagogical design combined the promotion of small-group dialogue focused on outlining a group solution to a challenge with wider whole-class dialogue focused on sharing and discussing the small-group work-in-progress designs in order to incorporate others’ ideas in the discussion. Besides, whole-class dialogue was used as a convergent activity at the end of some of the 431

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learning phases in which the small groups wrap up their ideas in order to communicate them to the rest of the class.These two levels of dialogue aimed to reinforce the sense of a dialogic community working together to find the best solutions to a given challenge instead of establishing a competition between groups trying to find the best solution. The promotion of different perspectives and ideas

All the activities of the project enhanced discussion among peers and negotiation of agreements. Students learned to express their ideas in the technological shared space, and they could interact by adding and editing each other’s contributions. Students could respond to each other intertwining verbal, non-verbal interaction and performing actions in the computer which might generate “sparks of insights” (Sawyer, 2006). Furthermore, students could widen and deepen their understanding of the shared ideas by recognising similarities and fusing ideas in a new perspective.These co-creative processes demand reaching consensus among peers and generating reasons, justifications and arguments in order to create a new and shared conceptualisation. However, in order to avoid narrowing the consensus down to one idea, students were encouraged to hold and agree on more than one group idea, keep record of these agreements in the shared space and re-visit the different ideas agreed on by the group during the process of solving the open-ended project. The promotion of togetherness among group members

Different researchers have studied the value of affection in creative connection building, creative ideation and reflection (e.g.Vass et al., 2014). Wegerif (2005) argues that playful talk and off-task interaction are indicative of interconnectedness, reflect “thinking by resonance” and are important instances of collective creativity. In the environmental interdisciplinary project, in order to foster togetherness between group members, the teacher designed carefully the layout of the class and the distribution of small groups in such a way that a small group of students were seated forming a square, which encouraged spoken and visual interactions. An interactive white board displayed their work-in progress; all the other small groups could see the display and discuss it in whole-class mode. Indeed, whenever technology was used, students worked together in a shared space; every student worked and was connected to the shared space with his/her own laptop and could easily contribute to the shared space.

The use of interactive technology to support co-creative dialogue During the creative project, both students and teacher could suggest the use of specific interactive technology to solve the challenge.Teachers promoted those technologies that could be used dialogically for the following three purposes. First, to allow setting up a synchronic shared space to which all users could interactively contribute, play and speculate. These technologies allow each other’s contributions to be visible, provisional and easily editable by the other members with access to the shared space. Thus, ideas and thoughts can be turned into tangible objects in the shared space and enable active engagement and hands-on contribution from all group members during the solving process of the project. Second, teachers encouraged students to use different tools to manipulate, organise and fashion all the information in the shared space (e.g. tables, concept maps, sketches). Third, students were encouraged to display visual representation of group ideas by using different types of information, both linguistic and graphic. Thus, students could establish an external and multimodal shared space in which expression of different ideas would be facilitated. 432

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Fourth, Caccoo technology was used to record small-group work and to develop cumulative dialogue. Caccoo technology allows the creation of different tabs in the same project and the organisation and classification of both process and product of small-group work.

Enrichment and orchestration of collaborative creativity processes Teachers designed different learning phases and tasks with tangible creative goals to pace group creativity flow and act as an external orchestration of group creative processes. The design of these phases and tasks followed the steps and processes involved in being creative and proposed by Sawyer (2012, 2013). In the centre of Figure 29.1 there is the representation of the different creative phases and activities designed for solving the proposed social challenge, and it takes the form of a diamond. The diamond visualises the three main creative processes proposed by Gray, Brown and Macanufo (2010) and taught explicitly during the solution of the creative challenge: a) Divergent processes (openness), in which students should generate and open up to new ideas and others’ points of view; b) Exploring and working together on the ideas emerged in the group and on new relevant information and c) Convergence processes (closure) in which students focus on searching for a group conclusion, a group decision or a group action through reflective and critical evaluation of ideas and information.

An illustration Figure 29.2 shows a brief description of how teachers pace and enrich group creativity processes to design a new decoration for one of the walls of the playground. In Figure 29.2 there are represented the six learning phases of the creative project. Each phase has a distinctive learning objective, and, accordingly, we designed specific classroom activities for each phase. For example, all the activities carried out during phase 2 were devoted to brainstorming, discussing and choosing the topic and content for the small-group wall decoration. Furthermore, Figure 29.2 presents the three types of Thinking Together activities proposed to the students to define and reflect on ground rules and how the different levels of dialogue were promoted during the educative project. The enrichment of creative processes and orchestration of group creativity flow in different phases favoured student interactions focusing on a lively engagement in generating a shared pool of ideas and fusing ideas towards a new perspective. Next, I will illustrate these two types of students’ interactions with an example. This example belongs to phase 3 (see Figure 29.2) in which students had to refine their ideas about the topic and the content for the wall design as well as learn about the best materials to use. To reach these learning objectives, the teacher proposed the students to look for real-life examples of painted walls in the city, neighbouring villages or on the Internet. Students then had to bring in their examples for submission to smallgroup discussion. Each student explained the photo selection; this explanation promoted the emergence of new ideas for their wall design. Furthermore, students evaluated the pros and cons of the materials and techniques used in each photo and conjectured about the adequacy or not to use them in the wall design. One small group of students brought and shared three photos from real-life decorated walls (see Figure 29.3): one Tetris, one tiling landscape and one coloured graffiti. Students’ photo search and selection was led by the common knowledge built during the previous small-group creative discussions, and all the photos met the criteria discussed during their previous joint work: their interest in the game of Tetris, the experience of one of the students in painting graffiti, their preferences for a colourful landscape and simple designs. Therefore, the photos showed 433

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Figure 29.2 Representation and description of the phases and tasks developed during the interdisciplinary project (Pifarré, 2019). Legend: SG – task performed in small group; WC – whole; ICT – computer is used (tagged as ICT).

the progression in students’ discourse developed during the creative activities of the project and how technology affords two interrelated features of dialogue: cumulative and recursive (Alexander, 2008). While sharing the photos, students were engaged in a communication characterised by explicit and tangible reasons that referred to specific characteristics of the shared photos rather than purely oral forms without concrete examples. For example, one of the students, when talking about the graffiti of photo 3 said “I think we could make a graffiti with our faces on it, like in this photo, but instead of these faces draw students’ faces smiling, being happy”. Students showed otherness’ orientation because each student gave situational and emotional information related with the photo (e.g. “it’s close to my house”) which raised other students’ interest, as seen in their verbal interaction (e.g. “I have already seen it, it is awesome”) and nonverbal interaction such as surprise, admiration and happiness. The visual representations (in this case in the form of photos) widened the possibilities to build new arguments and generate new ideas. For example when arguing about the pros of the photo of a landscape, one of the students introduced a new argument: … but the landscape is more environmentally-friendly than a Tetris. I do not like the Tetris, it means nothing to me. This led students to devise new insights about how to create the design on the wall and even more so the limitations that each representation could have. For example, one student fused the photo of Tetris and landscape into a new idea: why don’t we do a landscape with the squares of Tetris? This landscape (referring to photo 2) is made of small tiles, we could make them bigger and it would be easier to build it. This new idea had positive feedback from all the group members, and so they agreed that the topic for the wall decoration would be a sunset landscape designed with Tetris squares. In sum, this is a typical example about how technology affordances of multimodal 434

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Figure 29.3 Multimodal representation and evaluation of shared ideas in the classroom project. Students evaluate pros and cons of the techniques and materials used in the real-life wall photos (Pifarré, 2019).

representation of ideas, visibility and interactivity support students’ engagement in rich, new and multimodal forms of dialogue that, in turn, generate a shared new pool of ideas about the topic under discussion. Once students refined and agreed on the topic and the content of their design, students went on to evaluate which material would be best to use. In this occasion, the small group decided to organise their arguments in favour and against the different ideas in a table shown in the shared digital space, and it is presented in Figure 29.3. This representation allowed students to group together and visualise all members’ ideas, organise them as “in favour” or “against” and estimate the weight and added value of each argument. Students presented rich and reflective dialogue that promoted the consideration of multiple variables of the topic under reflection. In this example, students discussed the pros and the cons of materials and techniques to make their wall design come true. In Figure 29.3, it can be seen that students discussed the following variables: a) external constraints such as time to solve the task (e.g. in Figure 29.3: quick to paint), budget (e.g. in Figure 29.3: easy to get and buy) or the link of the design to an environmentally friendly rationale (e.g. in Figure 29.3: the smell is toxic); b) individual constraints such as: students’ expertise in designing, level of difficulty to develop the ideas (e.g. in Figure 29.3: difficult to do) and c) individual preferences such as: I like or I don’t like, I love the sea and the beach. 435

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Conclusions Today’s global and technological society requires citizens to engage themselves in creative dialogues through and around digital platforms.Therefore, there is a need to research the enactment of dialogic pedagogy to promote collective creativity by using technology in real-life classrooms. To this end, the chapter delineates a dialogic technology-enhanced pedagogical framework that involves the creation of a dialogic space for thinking creatively together, the use of interactive technologies with a dialogic intention and the enrichment and orchestration of creative processes and group flow. This technology-enhanced pedagogy was implemented in real-life secondary classrooms and teachers successfully used digital technology to shape students’ collective and creative practices.

Acknowledgement This research was funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Government (project number: EDU2016-80258-R).

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Manoli Pifarré Vass, E., & Deszpot, G. (2017). Introducing experience-centred approaches in music teacher education— Opportunities for pedagogic metamorphosis. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 23, 1–16. Vass, E., Littleton, K., Jones, A., & Miell, D. (2014). The affectively constituted dimensions of creative interthinking. International Journal of Educational Research, 66, 63–77. Wegerif, R. (2005). Reason and creativity in classroom dialogues. Language and Education, 19(3), 223–237. Wegerif, R. (2007). Dialogic education and technology: Expanding the space of learning. Retrieved from https://books.google.es/books?hl=ca&lr=&id=Th6iXwl-ur0C&oi=fnd&pg=PP10&dq=wegerif+dia logic&ots=hV0LX2nkU4&sig=11kWqBGqdK-cD1dOq-i0LG11AcU Wegerif, R. (2010). Mind-Expanding: Teaching for Thinking and Creativity. Buckingham: Open University Press/Mcgraw Hill. Wegerif, R. (2013). Dialogic. Education for the Internet Age. London: Rodopi. Wegerif, R., Doney, J., Richards, A., Mansour, N., Larkin, S., & Jamison, I. (2017). Exploring the ontological dimension of dialogic education through an evaluation of the impact of Internet mediated dialogue across cultural difference. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, (September), 0–1. doi:10.1016/j. lcsi.2017.10.003 Wegerif, R., & Mansour, N. (2010). A dialogic approach to technology-enhanced education for the global knowledge society. In M. S. Khine & I. M. Saleh (Eds.), New Science of Learning (pp. 325–339). New York: Springer. Wegerif, R., McLaren, B. M., Chamrada, M., Scheuer, O., Mansour, N., Mikšátko, J., & Williams, M. (2010). Exploring creative thinking in graphically mediated synchronous dialogues. Computers and Education, 54(3), 613–621. Wegerif, R., & Mercer, N. (2002). Is ‘exploratory talk’ productive talk? In K. Littleton and P. Light (Eds.).Learning with Computers (pp. 93–115). Routledge.

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30 RESEARCHING THE MATERIALITY OF COMMUNICATION IN AN EDUCATIONAL MAKERSPACE The meaning of social objects Kristiina Kumpulainen, Antti Rajala and Anu Kajamaa

Recent cultural, technological and pedagogical developments have resulted in major reconfigurations of the materialities of educational settings. Many schools are being equipped with novel digital tools and applications to address contemporary learning requirements and pedagogical approaches (Voogt, Korkeamäki, & Littleton, 2018). Not only are these new materialities entangled with teaching and learning processes, they can also extend and connect educational activities to the everyday lives of students and their communities outside the school, creating hybrid communication spaces for teaching and learning in which the everyday and formal funds of knowledge can vividly intersect (Kumpulainen, Mikkola & Rajala, 2018; Kajamaa, Kumpulainen & Rajala, 2018). Further, recent technological infrastructures and their learning arrangements allow students to relate to materiality in new ways. In these novel socio-material configurations, students are typically invited to act creatively to modify and develop material objects as part of the learning process. Hence, the materiality itself is in transformation through student agency (Kumpulainen, Kajamaa & Rajala, 2018). Relatedly, the actual physical spaces of schools are being transformed into more open and flexible spaces amplified with novel furnishings to support learner-centred pedagogies, serving diverse students and their needs (Daniels, Tse, Stables, & Cox, 2018). As the result of the new educational materialities, a number of researchers have called for a more nuanced conceptualisation and empirical operationalisation of materiality in communication, learning and education (Fenwick & Landri, 2012; Hetherington & Wegerif, 2018; Kuby & Roswell, 2017). At the same time the post-human and socio-material approaches have begun to challenge the more dominant dualistic thinking that typically regards materials, humans and the natural world as separate entities. This so called ‘material turn’ rests on relational ontology (e.g., Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Deleuze & Guattari, 1994; Taylor, 2016) that holds that humans, non-humans (i.e., material objects) and more-than-humans (i.e., natural world/nature) are entangled and intra-acting and, hence, mutually constitutive of each other with no clear boundaries. Furthermore, this conceptualising attempts to move away from a 439

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representational approach in which language and communicative action have typically played a central role towards a performative approach that holds that truths, realities, knowledges, relationships, literacies, agency and identities are performed in and through material-discursive practices (Kuby & Roswell, 2017). However, it is acknowledged that the actual empirical operationalisation of the new material turn in educational research warrants more attention and development. Similarly, the implications of this approach for informing educational practice and design deserve further inquiry. In this chapter, we are motivated to contribute to current theorising and empirical research on the materiality of communication in a novel technology-rich educational setting called a ‘makerspace’. Educational makerspaces prescribe a constructionist model of learner-centred pedagogies in which students can work on personally meaningful design projects and where they can make choices about their activities while simultaneously navigating several fields of knowledge and using novel materialialities, such as 3D printers, electronics, programming software and digital applications that enable them to externalise, share and build ideas into concrete material objects (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014; Honey & Kanter, 2013; Peppler, Halverson & Kafai, 2016). Makerspaces are regarded to hold educational potential to foster students’ agency, persistence, creative problem-solving, digital literacy, STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) learning and 21st century skills (see e.g., Honey & Kanter, 2013; Kafai, Fields & Searle, 2014; Lindtner, 2014; Martinez & Stager, 2013). In sum, makerspaces account for a complex set of materially mediated activities that encompass not only processes of creating specific material objects supported by a wide range of technologies and media but also emotional, relational and cultural processes surrounding the use and construction of material objects (Kumpulainen, 2017). In formal education as in any other culturally situated practices, there are normative expectations about how and to what ends cultural artefacts are used (Säljö, 2010). In the context of makerspaces, these educational expectations and goals are somewhat alternative to the traditional models of knowledge transmission, towards student agency, knowledge creation and creativity (Kumpulainen et al., 2018). That is, educational makerspaces hold normative values that are typically to do with positioning students as active ‘makers’ who are able, willing and competent to design and create new solutions for their personal and/or collective needs with the available material objects. These values and the educational goals of the makerspace typically target creating the next generation of STEAM workforce with an entrepreneurial, creative and collaborative mindset (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014). Material objects and materiality in general in educational processes are closely intertwined with power, politics and ideology (Knorr-Cetina, 1997) and hence urge more research attention at least from the perspectives of educational equity and educational change. We are interested in investigating how the materialities of an educational makerspace mediate the communication processes among students and their teachers during their design and making activities. By material objects, we refer to both natural and man-made artefacts that are available in the educational makerspace, including various technologies, such as laptops, computers, 3D printers, electronics, robotics and digital applications and software for design that students can freely choose to use based on their interests and self-selected design projects. To understand the mediational role of artefacts in educational makerspaces, our work draws on the notion of the ‘social object’ that explains how material objects can turn into a joint focus of attention and meaning making between students and teachers—similar to artefacts in a museum that spark conversation between people. In our conceptualising, we do not automatically view artefacts as social until they are integrated and taken up in communication and joint activity. We consider social objects as transactional, facilitating exchanges among those who 440

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encounter them (Knorr-Cetina, 1997; Simon, 2010).To this end, we ask how material objects of the educational makerspace turn into social objects in communication among students and their teachers and how social objects mediate the communication processes of teaching and learning in the educational makerspace.

Theorising the meaning and the role of materiality in educational makerspaces Our research work on the materiality of communication in a novel educational makerspace draws upon sociocultural theorising regarding tool-mediation (Vygotsky, 1986, 1997; Wertsch, 1991, 2002), the Bakhtinian inspired notion of the ‘dialogic space’ (Bakhtin, 1986; Wegerif, 2011) and material-discursive onto-epistemology proposed by Barad (2003, 2007). We suggest that regardless of their different starting points, the body of conceptual knowledge these theoretical approaches have generated offers a promising complementary approach for extending and empirically operationalising the meaning and role of materiality—with a specific attention to social objects—in and for teaching and learning in novel educational makerspaces. The sociocultural theorising underscores the historicity of human activity and material objects (Cole, 1996). Each material object has a history in the socio-genesis of a particular social practice. Material objects carry with them cultural knowledge both for the individual and for the collective about their history, purpose and use, including values and ideologies. Material objects can also act as mediational means for personal and/or collective remembering (Wertsch, 2002). Hence, for the sociocultural approach, it is important to understand human behaviour in the contexts of interdependent and ever-changing material-discursive spaces grounded in history. Similarly, in our work, material objects, when turned into social objects, are regarded as having their own voice(s) that carry with them cultural knowledge (Säljö, 2010; Wertsch, 2002). It is all these voices that together mediate the communication processes in educational makerspaces. In his seminal work on tool-mediation, Vygotsky and his co-investigators analysed how humans transform the environment in which they live through tool-mediated activities (Vygotsky, 1986; Vygotsky & Luria, 1994). They saw material-semiotic tools as constitutive of human activity and a prominent driving force for the development of human mind and culture (Vygotsky, 1986, 1997). For Vygotsky, language was the tool of tools; however, he did not undermine the mediational role of tangible objects (i.e., material tools or artefacts) for human learning and development. In fact, the centrality of materiality in human activity advocated by sociocultural theorising reminds us of how social action and semiotic tools (both tangible and conceptual) are intertwined (see also Ingold, 2010; Mäkitalo, 2011). To further define Vygotsky’s theory of ‘tool-mediation’, Wertsch (2007) proposes a distinction between explicit and implicit mediation. For him, explicit mediation refers to the intentional process of introducing a ‘stimulus means’ into an ongoing activity to overcome and potentially transform existing challenges or limitations. In explicit mediation, intention is overt, and the materiality as a stimulus means is ‘obvious and non-transitory’ (Wertsch 2007, p. 180). Implicit mediation involves signs, especially language, that are brought into the stream of joint activity as part of evolving joint action and communication. In implicit mediation, the material-semiotic tool is often less obvious than in explicit mediation and hence less easily taken up for joint attention and reflection. In our work, we are interested in empirically grasping the dynamics of explicit and implicit mediation in the communication among students, teachers and the material objects in the context of the educational makerspace. In particular, we are interested in how material objects—whether explicitly or implicitly taken up in student activity—turn into and function as ‘social objects’ in the material-dialogic spaces of communication to which the par441

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ticipants orient themselves in joint activity and the opportunities and tensions of these materialdiscursive spaces of communication for teaching and learning in an educational makerspace. The dialogic space has been defined in the literature as a specific communicative event that evidences exploration, problematisation and elaboration of diverse views and understanding in reasoned dialogue (Wegerif, 2008; Mercer, Hennessy, & Warwick, 2010). In following the new material turn, we propose that a material-discursive emphasis can be used to extend the original dialogic account of the production of meaning in a way that refocuses attention on the ‘voices’ of the material in co-mediating teaching and learning in educational makerspaces (see also Hetherington & Wegerif, 2018). In Barad’s (2003, 2007) material-discursive onto-epistemology, matter is an active participant in the performance of phenomena. There is no separation between matter and meaning but a single entangled reality in which humans and materials intra-act, making a difference in the activity and to its consequences and outcomes. These intra-actions and resulting performances, to which both people and materials contribute, co-create material-dialogic spaces with consequences to ontological, epistemic, social and ideological/political processes. Consequently, in our work, the material-dialogic space of communication accounts for an intra-acting space of possibilities in which the voices of the materialities, humans and more than humans intra-act and perform particular teaching and learning arrangements. Here the dialogic space overlaps with the material and physical, the material objects acting in varied roles and meanings in relation to social activity. It is these material-dialogic spaces that our research aims to examine with a specific interest in the meaning and role of materiality in a novel educational makerspace.

Empirical study The empirical data of our research stem from a Finnish city-run comprehensive school with 535 students and 28 teachers at the primary level. Like any other school in Finland, this school follows the national core curriculum, which has been defined locally. The local curriculum of the school stresses design learning, which is considered to enhance students’ creative problemsolving skills across the curriculum. The school strives for learner-centeredness and for innovations in learning and teaching and is committed to following the principles of progressive inquiry in its pedagogy (as expressed in its local curriculum document of 2016). As a response, the school has recently (in autumn 2016) introduced a new educational makerspace, the FUSE Studio (www.fusestudio.net), as part of its elective courses as a means of enhancing interestdriven, student-centred, empowering, collective and inclusive learning.

FUSE Studio The FUSE Studio is an educational makerspace,‘a choice-based digital infrastructure for STEAM learning’ (Stevens & Jona, 2017).The technological infrastructure of the FUSE Studio offers students different STEAM challenges that ‘level up’ in difficulty like video games. The challenges include Spaghetti Structures, Jewellery Designer, Robot Obstacle Course, Keychain Customiser, Electric Apparel, Coaster Boss and Solar Roller. The challenges are accompanied by various tools, such as computers, 3D printers and other materials (e.g., foam rubber, marbles, tape and scissors), as well as instructions for how to process the challenges (see Figure 30.1). Each FUSE maker challenge is designed to engage students in different STEAM topics and skill sets. The challenges have been carefully structured to introduce students to new ideas and to support them through more complex iterations of those ideas. Students can choose, based on their own interests, which challenges they want to work on, when and with whom. 442

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Figure 30.1 Students working on the FUSE Studio maker challenges.

They can choose to work alone or with peers. There is no formal grading or assessment by teachers. Instead, using photos, videos or other digital artefacts, students can document their completion of a challenge, and the completion unlocks the next challenge in a sequence.

Methods The primary data of this study is comprised of 75 hours of video recordings of students aged between nine and 12 years (N = 94) carrying out design activities in the FUSE Studio makerspace. The recordings were collected intermittently every week over a period of one semester. The videos were filmed by a team of researchers that included four master-level students and three university researchers. The research group had four cameras in total. Depending on how many researchers were available to film the lessons on given days, two to four cameras were filming at once. Generally, half of the cameras were filming teachers and half focused on students working in the makerspace.Wireless microphones were attached to the video cameras to record oral communication between the students and teachers.The students’ activities on the computer screens were also video-recorded, whenever it was deemed a part of the problem solving or communication. The data come from three different groups of students and their teachers who participated in the FUSE Studio elective course. Due to the elective nature of the course, the groups consisted of students from several classes. Group 1 consisted of 32 students (22 boys and 10 girls), Group 2 consisted of 30 students (19 boys and 11 girls) and Group 3 consisted of 32 students (19 boys and 13 girls). Each group was supported by two to four teachers and teaching assistants. 443

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At the beginning, each group had one 45-minute FUSE session a week, but later, sessions were extended to 60 minutes. Each student group was assigned a teacher in charge, but other teachers and teaching assistants worked in the groups as well. Altogether, the school had six male and two female teachers who ran the FUSE makerspaces.The teachers had participated in a two-day FUSE training provided by members of the FUSE team from the United States. The teachers were presented the opportunity to partake in the training according to their own interests in the field of innovative STEAM learning. The FUSE Studio was situated in the school’s computer lab, a neighbouring classroom space and the nearby hallway. In the computer lab, there were 22 desktop computers and separate laptops. The students could freely choose where they wanted to work and whether they wanted to work alone, in pairs or in small groups. The choice often depended on which design challenge the student was interested in working with. For example, the Dream Home challenge was often realised individually by the students, whereas the Coaster Boss practically required teamwork due to the construction work with the material objects. Since the students could also choose the challenge they wished to work on, the chosen challenge often guided their choice of location and group size. For example, the Coaster Boss and Solar Roller challenges took up plenty of space, so students often worked in the corridor on those challenges. Dream Home and Ringtones did not require any extra materials or space, so students often worked in the computer lab.

Data analysis The video data were transcribed and analysed using interaction analysis methods that took into account verbal, visual and material conduct (Jordan & Henderson, 1995). The data were approached inductively by first approaching the video corpus as a whole and then focusing on selected events in greater depth (Derry et al., 2010). In particular, we were interested in those moments in the video data that gave concrete evidence of the intra-actions between the students, teachers and material objects of the FUSE Studio makerspace in the sociocultural context of the school.

Findings Next, we turn to illuminating the ways in which the materiality was entangled and mediated the communication among students and their teachers in the educational makerspace, creating opportunities and tensions. The examples show how the material objects of the makerspace were transformed into social objects in the material-discursive spaces of communication, the activity being primarily about the objects (Examples 1–2), around the objects (Examples 3–4) and with the objects (Examples 5–6). At the same time, each example also demonstrates the ways in which different voices stemming from the socio-material context were enacted with opportunities and tensions for teaching and learning according to the ideals advocated by maker education as well as the normative expectations of the formal school context. Example 1: ‘Saving on Ringtones does not work.’ Our first example pictures a material-dialogic space of communication about the material object itself. Here, the materiality itself is at the centre and is the topic of communication. According to the teacher interviews, the malfunctioning of the technical infrastructure

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of the FUSE Studio was typical, especially during the first year of its implementation. In these communication situations, there was often a shift in the meaning of the ­technology for the ongoing activity from implicit mediation of the material object into a more explicit mode. In the next example, the voice of the teacher who instructs the students about the malfunctioning of the technology is dominant.There is little evidence of the students’ voices of initiation, agency or creativity as advocated by maker education. 1. Teacher Bill: Hey, if you’re doing that ringtone, then try to get it in good shape today because saving it doesn’t work. 2. Student 1/Marika: Okay. 3. Teacher Bill: So, it could be a good goal to get it, get this one level finished today. 4. Student 2/Leena: Okay. Should we try? 5. Teacher Bill: Mm. Because saving doesn’t work right now. 6. Student 1/Marika + Student 2/Leena: Okay, yeah. 7. Teacher Bill: It’s a little … You have to start again next time if you don’t finish. The excerpt begins when the teacher Bill notices that saving audio files does not work on the Ringtones software. Two groups of two girls are working on the challenge, and the teacher informs both of them about the malfunction. Although the technical issue is not ideal, the teacher attempts to turn the situation into a motivational factor by asking the students to work hard so that they can complete the whole level of the design challenge in one session (lines 3, 7). Here, the material-dialogic space is embedded in procedural communication with little reflection and negotiation. Through the teacher’s interpretation of its meaning, the technological failure also contributed to the conditions of the social activity of the students, adding a sense of urgency to complete the task in less time than usual.

Example 2: ‘Hey, what’s this “hole thing”?’ Example 2 illuminates communication where the students are wondering and experimenting about the use and functioning of FUSE Studio design software, supported by the teacher. The example demonstrates the students’ sense making about the material objects in the educational makerspace. Here, it becomes clear how learning to use the advanced technological tools of the educational makerspace is pivotal for gaining access and authority in making activities in this space. Here, the explicit mediation of the material object of teaching and learning activities is very visible.

1. Student 1/Mel: Hey, what is this ‘hole thing’? 2. Teacher Sam: What thing? 3. Student 1/Mel: Hole. That hole. 4. Teacher Sam: Yeah you’re supposed to make a hole there. 5. Student 1/Mel: What hole? 6. Teacher Sam: Or what? 7. Student 1/Mel: No, I mean what is that hole? 8. Student 2/Anne: Yeah, what does it do? 9. Teacher Sam: Is it that it turns transparent for a while so you can … Click on it again so it goes into the hole-mode. [girl clicks]

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10. Teacher Sam: Yeah, so it shows that you can, it turns transparent so you can see through it. If you have that kind of situation that your planning requires you to be able to look through it. 11. Student 1/Mel: What do we do now that we’re ready? 12. Student 2/Anne: We should probably look at the video. 13. Teacher Sam: Look at the directions, I can’t remember by heart. 14. Student 1/Mel: You’re guiding it now Anne, I can’t be using that thing [the laptop] the whole time. 15. Student 2/Anne: Okay. So, let’s continue. [clicks open the directions video on the website] 16. Student 1/Mel: This is so slow … We have done that already. 17. Student 2/Anne: Okay, new video. [girls continue watching, teacher leaves] In this example, two girls Mel and Anne are sharing a laptop and working together on a design challenge called the Keychain Customiser. They are designing a model of a keychain but are unsure of the software Tinkercad’s commands. For that reason, they ask for the teacher’s help. The teacher Sam suggests that they try out the hole-command (line 9), but he does not demonstrate using the command himself; instead, he encourages the students to do it.Then, the teacher explains what the command does and why one might use it (line 10). When the students ask what to do next, the teacher guides the students to look at the directions (line 13), like Anne had suggested (line 12). By asking the students to do so, the teacher confirms a practice typically advocated by maker education that students should try to use other resources among themselves before asking for a teacher’s help (Stevens & Jona, 2017). Consequently, the materialdialogical space of the students’ joint activity is expanded to involve the set of resources found on the website to support the students’ independent engagement with the challenges and the associated technology. Therefore, the teacher points to the rules of the task and refocuses the students on it.This makes Mel assign the computer turn to Anne (line 14) who agrees (line 15). When Mel and Anne start looking for the directions, the teacher stays and listens to their discussion. When they are refocused on the task, the teacher leaves. Example 3: The stickiness of artefacts Our analysis of the data reveals that oftentimes the material artefacts of the educational makerspace functioned as a ‘glue’ that brought both the students and teachers together around the materials to observe, wonder, discuss and/or share, as demonstrated in Figure 30.2. At times, these material-discursive spaces of communication were filled with silence with everyone intensively observing what was happening while the technology (such as 3D printer) or a human (a student or teacher) constructed or developed something. We could also identify conversations about the matter and its meaning situated in the present, the students explaining what was happening or giving instructions about alternative ways of working or using other material objects than those available in the makerspace. Excitement, interest and emotional engagement in general were made visible by non-verbal and verbal communication in the material-dialogic spaces around social objects. At times, the conversation travelled beyond the present across time and space while the students shared stories, experiences and knowledge from their lives in the socio-material context of the makerspace. 446

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Figure 30.2 3D printer as a magic machine.

Example 4: Messing around with artefacts Example 4 illuminates an alternative or, in fact, a competing material-dialogic space of communication constructed in the educational makerspace. Here, the students were engaged in another activity that they found more meaningful instead of working on a design challenge. That is, they were playing around a mobile game with their mobile phones. [teacher walks into hallway to check on boys]

1. Student 1/Pekka: They’re just playing … 2. Teacher Greg: Hey, what game do you have going on here? 3. Student 1/ Pekka: They’re playing Clash Royale … 4. Teacher Greg: Hey, put Clash Royale in your pocket and put your games away. In this example, the teacher walks into the hallway where a group of boys are working on a Coaster Boss design challenge. One of the students Pekka in the group responds immediately to the teacher’s presence by explaining why their work is not coming along (line 1). The teacher takes a strong stance with his hands on his waist, which can also be interpreted as a nonverbal sign of authority, as he asks the students to stop playing the game (line 4). The students obey the teacher’s request and continue working on the FUSE design challenge. Overall, this example demonstrates the co-presence of at least two material-dialogic spaces that are performed in parallel, that is, working on the design challenge and playing the students’ own digital game. The co-presence of multiple material-dialogic spaces is enhanced by the fact that the online world and students’ mobile phones are also commonly used in the FUSE Studio makerspace for the design challenge activities and their documentation. The teacher’s actions in the example can be seen as an attempt to contain and constrain the dialogical-material space of the students’ activity. The example also demonstrates how digital tools define and alter the nature of the material-dialogic spaces, and ask for the students’ accountable agency to follow the expectations for their activity. 447

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Example 5: Making a Dream Home Example 5 demonstrates how the materiality of the educational makerspace functioned as an explicit mediational means to explain with. In this example, the students are working on the Dream Home design challenge. 1. Student 1/Tara: I would like to turn this so I can get to the other side. 2. Student 2/Hanna: Me too, because I don’t even know how to get there. 3. Teacher John: Well wait, let’s see who is furthest along in Dream Home. Eric and Ian, have you rotated the angles there so you can get to the other side of the house? 4. Student 3/Rick: I have! 5. Teacher Greg: Hold down the mouse’s button and then spin. 6. Teacher John: Okay, Rick can come instruct. 7. Student 3/Rick: [comes over to the girls] What? 8. Student 2/Hanna: How on earth do you turn this? 9. Teacher John: Hold down the mouse and … 10. Student 3/Rick: What did you want to do? 11. Student 1/Tara: Rotate the angle. 12. Student 3/Rick: Take that and then … [Tara rotates] 13. Teacher John: Which one was it, Rick? Why don’t you show me too. 14. Student 3/Rick: This tool. 15. Teacher John: Oh! Here,Tara and Hanna have asked the teacher for help with rotating the view so they can see the whole house.The teacher’s first response is to find other students to help (line 3). By asking other students to help, the teacher is encouraging relative expertise in which the students can act as experts on the challenges. Student Rick is eager to help and comes over to advise the girls. After this, the teacher asks Rick to show him how to do it as well (line 13). By doing so, the teacher indicates that it is acceptable that teachers do not always know what to do in all of the challenges. He also reinforces Rick as an expert of the challenge. Interestingly, teacher Greg exclaims the instructions in the middle of the conversation (line 5), even though he is helping other students at the time. Greg is probably aiming to speed the helping process, but this is in conflict with the other teacher’s intervention strategy and that of the pedagogical model of the FUSE Studio makerspace that advocates for relative expertise. Teacher John does repeat these instructions partially (line 9) but then lets student Rick help and explain it to the two girls. Example 6: Transforming the material confounds In our final example, we illuminate how a tension between the students’ interest and the material requirements of the makerspace triggered a productive material-dialogic space that took the students’ maker activity beyond the given design challenge. Here, the teacher’s interpretation of the challenge was instrumental in transforming the learning activity into a meaningful one for the students and in facilitating a material-dialogic space for joint problem solving between himself and the students. This example also makes visible improvisations and overcoming obstacles inscribed in the material whilst communicating and making joint meaning with the material artefact. 1. Student 1/Anton: What should I do now? I want to do a wristband and then to 3D print it. [It is on his computer. The teacher approaches him and stands beside him with a hand on her jaw.] 448

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2. Teacher Beth: But like [chuckles], the challenge is that at this first level, you must do some simple earring models. 3. Student 1/Anton: Do I have to do the earring model? 4. Teacher Beth: Yes. At level one and they are done in 2D, which means that they are done as though you designed them on paper and cut them and look at what they could be like. It has the idea that you perceive what the size is, so that when you start to draw bigger things or something else so that you know which is about the size [waves her hands in circles], like around which you move about. I mean in these instructions it is like you draw some earrings on paper, you cut them and then you see if it is really a good size, can you move it a bit down-then [in reduced voice]. Wait here; you have to watch the video because I am not sure what it means. 5. Student 1/Anton: I will wait until Mike [student 2] comes, I will do it with him, but is it obligatory to make an earring? 6. Teacher Beth: Um, well, like this is the order to get to the next level. So, you should, this, but you can, wait, it does not necessarily have to be. What else could it be apart from earrings? 7. Student 2/Mike: A finger thing! 8. Teacher Beth: Yes, for example [to Anton]. Did you hear this? 9. Student 1/Anton: Yes! 10. Teacher Beth: Because it is about the same size like the earring. So, the idea is that you measure it. Because after it you will do the digital modelling. The finger thing probably works as well as an earring. In this example, Anton wants to start working on Jewellery Designer (a FUSE Level 1 challenge). He asks the teacher Beth for help (lines 1–3). Mike is standing behind Anton and wants to know what Anton is going to do. Anton explains that he is going to design a wristband and print it out with the 3D printer when it arrives. The instructions for the challenge are in English, and the teacher translates the instructions for Anton (line 4).These instructions ask the student to design a simple earring. Anton expresses that he does not want to design earrings and asks the teacher if he can design something else (line 5). The teacher replies that in this level of the design challenge, he is supposed to design earrings so that he can begin to understand the role of the size of a product in the design process.The teacher then wonders out loud if Anton could nevertheless design something else the same size as an earring. Mike suggests that Kasper could design a ‘finger thing’ (line 7), and the teacher agrees, because a ‘finger thing’ is about the same size. The teacher again highlights that the idea is to measure the design (line 10). Anton’s personal interest to create a wristband and the requirements built into the maker design challenge (to create earrings) did not match and thus created tension. The vignette demonstrates how the educational makerspace, with its aim of promoting interest-driven learning, can turn into traditional classroom activity in which the student has to follow tasks and instructions embedded in the material with no opportunities for creative deviations from the plan. In this case, a productive resolution was reached, with the teacher and another student, Mike, coming up with an alternative design idea that nevertheless met the learning goals set for the task. The fulfilment of Anton’s interest was reached in a material-dialogic space in which the voice of the student and teacher were given authority. Here, the teacher’s interpretation of the task is instrumental, in the sense that the teacher interprets the task not as being specifically about designing an earring (but more broadly, as being about designing a small item (i.e., acquiring expertise in the design process). The tension and its improvisational resolution led Anton to engage in a maker activity he found meaningful, and it also transformed the activity setting. 449

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Discussion In this chapter, we have been motivated to contribute to current theorising and empirical research on the role and meaning of materiality in a novel educational makerspace. We have argued that this knowledge is pivotal for understanding and supporting communication and learning in a makerspace environment where the students independently navigate and integrate knowledge from different resources and domains using a range of material artefacts during their design and making activities (see also Ludvigsen, 2009). To further the field, we drew upon the concepts of ‘social objects’ and ‘material-dialogic space’ to explain how material artefacts can become socialised in ongoing communication among students and teachers while they engage in design and making activities. Namely, we illuminated how students, teachers and materials enact together and enable particular teaching and learning phenomena to emerge, with opportunities and tensions. We hold that this knowledge can potentially drive future understanding and development of educational spaces, their materialities, as well as enhancing teaching and learning opportunities in educational makerspaces and beyond. Recent research also underlines the importance of this knowledge, indicating that teachers are often unaware of the meaning and role of materiality in and for their teaching (Hetherington & Wegerif, 2018). Our study makes visible how the materialities of the educational makerspace are an important part of the communication and meaning-making processes among students and teachers, supporting and challenging ongoing teaching and learning activities. The study demonstrates the nuanced ways in which material artefacts are transformed into social objects in the materialdialogic spaces of communication. It also suggests how the practices, rules and values of the socio-historical context of the school and those of the novel educational makerspace and the historicities of the participants themselves are a pivotal part of the ongoing communication, mediating the nature of teaching and learning phenomena in situ (see also Kumpulainen et al., 2018; Rasmussen, Amundrud & Ludvigsen, Chapter 28 in this volume). Our study reveals three distinct, yet often overlapping ways in which the material objects of the educational makerspace become socialised in the students’ and teachers’ communication processes in the educational makerspace. Namely, about (i.e., centred on material objects); around (i.e., in the context of material objects) and with (i.e., constituted with the material objects) artefacts. First, we identified material-dialogic spaces of communication in which the primary activity was about the material objects themselves. This mode of relating to material objects became evident especially when the habitual ways of engagement were disrupted, for example by technological failures or discrepancy between the means and ends of the activity (see also Dewey, 1933). The problems in the technological infrastructure also created uncertainty among the teachers and challenged their role as authority as they did not always have control over the material objects themselves either. Second, we identified material-dialogic spaces of communication in which the primary activity took place around the material objects. Our analysis suggests that the contemporary pedagogical and digital infrastructure engender dynamically shifting and expansive materialdialogic spaces. For example, the group configurations in the FUSE Studio makerspace are flexible, and the students are invited to work across groups to help other students. Similarly, digital tools offer vast possibilities for expanding the scope of the activity and dialogue. This imposes difficulties for teachers whose institutional task is traditionally to contain and at times also constrain the students’ activity. Third, we depicted activity and communication among the students and teachers that was primarily about working and making meaning with the material objects. Here, the material artefacts played an important role as semiotic tools to communicate and establish joint meaning.

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At times, this also led to improvisation and creativity among the teachers and students in finding alternative ways to design and make. Altogether, these three positions of material artefacts in the students’ and their teachers’ communication demonstrate an active and intertwined interplay between explicit and implicit mediation. In fact, our findings imply that the borderline between these two forms of mediation is very blurred and shifting in the material-dialogic spaces performed in the educational makerspace. Our study also reveals a dynamic inter-animation of different voices emerging in the intra-actions of the students, teachers and materialities of the educational makerspace embedded in the sociocultural contexts of the school. The interanimation of voices that were performed into being in the material-dialogic spaces of the educational makerspace evidence delicate and at times strong power relationships in the positioning of different voices, with consequences for teaching and learning. As our empirical examples show, at times, the voices of the materiality dominated the communication, undermining the voices of others. At other times, it was the teacher’s voice that became more authoritative than other voices, with opportunities and tensions for student-centred learning. We also depicted material-dialogic spaces of communication that demonstrate joint reasoning and meaning making between the students and teachers, giving rise to relative expertise and enhancing the students’ interest-driven creative activities. Our research also points out how materiality is an important mediator of power and educational equity, making materiality a pivotal research focus for future studies in education. In our research, not all the students were found to engage in interest-driven STEAM learning activities in the educational makerspace despite free choice of the design challenges they could work on. Instead, they found their own mobile games more compelling. Our observations resonate with existing research that points out how makerspaces hosted by various educational and cultural institutions often fail to attract and engage the broader population of young people in learning due to culturally biased materialities and activities (Barton, Tan & Greenberg, 2016; Peppler et al., 2016). Our research echoes these concerns and calls for the quality and inclusivity of makerspaces and their materialities and urges further investigation into novel, material-rich educational spaces as they are related to creating democratic, equitable and deep learning experiences for diverse students.

Acknowledgements The research work reported in this chapter has been financially supported by Learning by Making:The educational potential of school-based makerspaces for young learners’ digital competencies (iMake) project funded by the Academy of Finland (project no: 310790).

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31 THE POLYPHONIC MODEL OF COLLABORATIVE LEARNING Stefan Trausan-Matu

Introduction Dialogic learning is a theoretical framework for knowledge building in collaborative learning (Koschmann, 1999; Stahl, 2009; Trausan-Matu, 2010), based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism and polyphony (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984). Dialogic learning is specific to dialogs using natural language, both face-to-face and, in recent years, through virtual collaboration in Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) using instant messaging (chat) on Internet and other facilities of the social web, such as discussion forums, wikis, blogs, etc. Moreover, many Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were launched, which may include collaborative sessions. In this new context, learning is a combination of individual reading, thinking, choices and action, according to individual personalities and, simultaneously, collaboration with other learners through dialogs including debates, facilitated by instant communication and other social web facilities. However, in order to induce a dialogic style of learning, special attention should be paid to designing the debates according to the idea of fostering multivocality and interanimation, in a polyphonic way, which, as it will be discussed herein, is a model for complex human collaboration and, as Bakhtin affirmed, is in fact present in the whole of human life and experience (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 42). For teachers it is very difficult to moderate and analyse collaborative learning sessions, because, for example, for analysing a collaborative learning conversation log a time at least twice its duration may be needed (Trausan-Matu, 2010), an impossibility especially for grading the thousands of students enrolled for an MOOC. Therefore, computer-support (‘learning analytics’) tools are needed. Considering that collaboration is done mainly through natural language dialog, these tools should be able to detect from the dialog text (for example, chat logs) if there is a real dialogic framework, which enhances group collaboration, and if each learner had contributions to the knowledge-building process. Unfortunately, state of the art computer technology for discourse analysis cannot fully detect the previous two mentioned details. However, it may provide support tools for humans (teachers and students) who analyse dialogs in collaborative sessions, as we will discuss in this chapter. Typically, computer-support tools developed for analysing collaborative sessions make use of statistical analysis and (statistical) machine learning, starting from the number and content of utterances of each participant or from a code-and-count approach. However, statistics cannot 454

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enter into the deepness of knowledge building and debate of ideas, which include complex sequences of divergences followed by convergences. It is like evaluating musical pieces of Bach, Mozart or Chopin starting from the statistics of the notes used. Of course, those statistics may give a glimpse, but they cannot capture the quality, the beauty, interanimation and creativity of a musical piece, which may be considered ideals to be achieved also in collaborative learning. Starting from this analogy, a suggestion for how to analyse knowledge building and debates of ideas is to consider the complex weaving of musical polyphony, where several voices/ideas are concurrently developed in time, with the consequence that some dissonances/divergences occur, but eventually a coherent whole, a discourse, is achieved. Considering polyphony for analysing collaborative learning discussion logs is not an outlandish idea. A piece of evidence that collaborative learning chats have an implicit musicality was obtained by the sonification of several chats starting from the polyphonic model (Calinescu & Trausan-Matu, 2013). Moreover, polyphony is not specific only to music; it may be found also in novels (Bakhtin, 1984) and, in fact, it mirrors the complexity of human social activities. As Bakhtin wrote, polyphony involves “different voices singing variously on a single theme.This is indeed ‘multivoicedness,’ exposing the diversity of life and the great complexity of human experience. ‘Everything in life is counterpoint, that is, opposition’” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 42). Furthermore, considering polyphony in a larger extent is subsumed by the fact that music is a fundamental human feature, having a major role, in various forms, in many human activities, especially in collaborative settings. It has been proven that music, even at more basic levels than polyphony, has essential things in common with natural language (Levitin, 2006); it has a major role in human life (Ball, 2010) and in collaborative activities. The links between natural language and music started to be revealed also by results in neurology (Sacks, 2007) and by Natural Language Processing techniques (Calinescu & Trausan-Matu, 2013). Repetition and rhythm, essential features of music, that may play a special role for the involvement in a jointly built discourse (Tannen, 2007), are also very important from a neurological point of view, helping also the recovery from some injuries or illnesses (Sacks, 2007). However, in dialogic learning, it should be paid attention that repetition and rhythm are multivocal, that they occur in interanimation patterns (Trausan-Matu, Stahl & Sarmiento, 2007), inducing polyphony, which means there is not a single voice that monopolizes the discourse. The focus on this chapter is on the analysis of collaborative learning in small groups of students, starting from a polyphonic model, in which are identified several interanimating voices that have inherently different, conflicting ‘personalities’ but which build knowledge, achieving a coherent whole. The concept of ‘voice’ is generalized to include ideas, the interanimation of voices being a debate including a dialogic framework of ideas, among which divergences resolved in convergences occur. The analysis may be performed manually but, due to the complexity of the dialogic discourse in collaborative learning sessions, computer support is needed. Starting from the polyphonic model, computer tools were developed, as will be discussed in a subsequent section. The analysis may be done either on logs of online chats or on recorded dialogs in face-to-face settings, for example, in classrooms, in the latter case starting from both the transcripts of the discussions and the video recordings, considering also the interanimation of non-verbal acts, individual or collective (Trausan-Matu, 2013). Polyphony may be encountered in many collaborative learning sessions. An example is a collaborative chat session in which a group of students solved a mathematical problem that they could not solve individually (Stahl, 2009, pp. 60–64). Several voices entered into a polyphonic interanimation weaving starting from a pastiche utterance, a ‘voice’ faking a mathematical reasoning, the replied utterances constituting voices among which convergences and divergences occurred, eventually a final ‘dissonance’ (divergence) driving to a ‘consonance’ – the solution of 455

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Figure 31.1 Excerpt of a homework chat session.

the problem (Trausan-Matu et al., 2007). However, polyphony may also be induced by specially designed homeworks in which students are put to debate about the features and interrelations of learned concepts on instant messenger (chats) with or without a moderator (Trausan-Matu, Dascalu & Rebedea, 2014). In Figure 31.1 is presented an excerpt from such an CSCL chat session where students were given homework to discuss what features an advanced chat environment should have.

Dialogic learning Collaborative learning is mainly based on dialogs. The idea of using dialogs for learning is not new. The best example are Socratic dialogs written by Plato more than 24 centuries ago, in which the maieutic method is used for “giving birth” to truth. Mikhail Bakhtin discusses in detail about the Socratic notion of the dialogic nature of truth, and the dialogic nature of human thinking about truth. The dialogic way of seeking truth is counterposed to official monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth, and it is also counterposed to the naive self-confidence of those people who think that they know something, that is, who think that they possess certain truths. (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 110) The previous quote and the polyphony perspective are consonant with the idea that instead of viewing education as a process of transferring knowledge from a professor or from a book to the learner, the latter should be involved in a dialog aimed at searching for understanding and truth: 456

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“Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 110); “Any true understanding is dialogic in nature” (Voloshinov, 1973). Digital technology had several kinds of impact on dialogic learning. These technologies may be used in classroom (Louis & Warwick, Chapter 27 in this volume; Rasmussen, Amundrud & Ludgvigsen, Chapter 28 in this volume; Staarman & Ametller, Chapter 34 in this volume; Pifarré, Chapter 29 in this volume), outside classrooms as a supplementary activity (as in our case, homeworks) and totally separated from classrooms, for example, forums of discussion or chats in MOOCs. Approaches considered aspects such as the constructed “boundary objects” (Ligorio, Amenduni & McLay, Chapter 35 in this volume; Kumpulainen, Rajala & Kajamaa, Chapter 30 in this volume), the way the usage of this technology affects attention in classes (Rasmussen, this volume), the role of materiality (Kumpulainen, Rajala & Kajamaa, Chapter 30 in this volume), the tempo of conversations (Ligorio & Ritella, 2010), transacts (Joshi & Rosé, 2007; Rosé et al., 2008), micro-creativity (Chiu, 2013), etc. Excepting the approaches that analyse the tempo and transactivity, the others are focusing on effects of the collaboration process, not on analysing the process of dialogic collaboration. The focus of this chapter is exactly on this aspect: how could we analyse dialogic learning in collaborative settings? Which is an appropriate model of such a process? The proposed solution considers polyphony as a conceptual model. The fact that truth and human thinking have a dialogic nature is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the polyphonic perspective in learning, as even Bakhtin remarked “authentic polyphony … did not and could not have existed in the Socratic dialogue” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 178).

The polyphonic model Polyphony in collaborative learning and in music have many things in common. In the latter case, it may be defined as a multi-party dialog among several different melodic lines with equal importance (called voices), which start from a common theme. Each voice usually diverges towards variations, implicitly generating dissonances with other, concurrent voices, but dissonances are resolved and a coherent whole is achieved; a musical discourse is built. Polyphony may be found in many kinds of music, including, for example, improvisations in New Orleans jazz, which probably best expresses the idea that polyphony conveys the joy of being together and building a joint achievement in spite (but taking advantage) of differences between participants. It is an interanimation process like dance and group creativity. In collaborative learning, polyphony may drive to what Gerry Stahl calls moments of collaboration (Stahl, 2006) encountered in collaborative online or face-to-face learning sessions. Usually polyphony is discussed in the context of classical music, with the theoretical framework based on the rules of counterpoint (“note counter note”) (Fux 1966), which assure that monotony is avoided while harmony is however achieved. The presence of several dissonances is very important, because they avoid flatness. They also induce the need to be resolved with consonances, in order to achieve the coherence of a discourse. This sequencing of dissonances– consonances is the same as the divergence–convergence steps well known in the case of creativity fostering systems (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996), with beneficial effects in collaborative learning for finding solutions and identifying novel features and relations. In collaborative learning, polyphony is built rather like in jazz and not as in classical music because it is achieved collaboratively by the participants, on the spot, by improvisation, as a result of group creativity (Sawyer, 2003); it is not “designed” by a single person, the composer, like in classical music. Sfard emphasized that “rather than speaking about ‘acquisition of knowledge’, many people prefer to view learning as becoming a participant in a certain discourse” (Sfard, 2000). 457

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Because each musical piece is a discourse, a result of a creative process, in jazz, polyphony being an apex of discourse building and group creativity, collaborative learning as involvement into a jointly built discourse may take discourse building in jazz polyphony as a model. In addition to discourse building, creativity is an important feature of learning, for example, in solving a problem or finding new features and relations when debating about learned concepts, either as group or individual creativity, in the form of “micro-creativity”, that means re-discovering truths or solutions to problems by learners (Chiu, 2013). Collaborative learning can be consequently viewed as a creative process, in which students build knowledge, achieve understanding on several topics and discover solutions to problems. It may be related to creativity fostering in small groups in brainstorming sessions. This process is very important now, when the focus of education should be on making learners think creatively (Wegerif, 2006), not on memorizing facts, when everybody can access on the web to almost any existing piece of knowledge. The polyphonic music metaphor is germane for discourse modeling and analysis in collaborative learning while other approaches cannot handle the creative and simultaneously coherent complexities of the collaboratively built discourse. For example, collaborative discourse is oftentimes analysed with several code-and-count or other statistical tools, but, like in the case of music, do the statistics of what notes or chords are used reflect the quality of a melody? The experience of participation in successful collaborative conversations, with learning purposes (when a solution was found, or a coherent discussion was achieved, a discourse was built) or in other contexts, provides satisfaction like that of the participation in a polyphonic jazz improvisation or even of listening to it or a piece of polyphonic classic music, for example, a composition of Johann Sebastian Bach. In order to better understand the ideas of the polyphonic model and how it can be used for analysing dialogs in collaborative learning sessions, the basic implied concepts are discussed in the following four sections.

Voices and utterances, in generalized senses In polyphonic music, the concept of “voice” is used in a generalized sense, being, as mentioned previously, a distinct melodic line that coexists with other ones. Therefore, it is not related only to the human’s voice, as an individual way of speaking or singing (in fact, persons may speak with another voice in a ventriloquism phenomenon). A voice is rather an independent position, with a longitudinal extent, characterized by a distinct way of playing and developing a musical theme, in parallel to other voices. It is not a one-to-one association of a voice to a single instrument or instrumentalist. A voice, a melodic line, may be played in sequence by several group of instrumentalists in the orchestra (violins, violas, cellos, etc., which behave as an individual), for example, in Brahms’ symphonies. From an orthogonal dimension, several voices may be played by a single person at a piano, organ or violin; a pianist may play, for example, with his/her two hands three or even more voices. Inspired from the previously discussed generalized sense of voices in music, the polyphonic model of natural language discourse is extending the idea of voice from its obvious denotation as the sounds emitted by the speech of a given person, to the generalized concept of a distinct position: a concept, an idea, a theory or a paradigm (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn (1962)) articulated by a repeated thread of utterances. This sense is in fact in consonance with the fact that ideas, theories, paradigms, etc. are usually verbalized; they are expressed in natural language and come as inner voices in our intra-subjective reasoning. For example, the Darwinism theory may be seen as a “voice” that enters in debates with the “voice” of the Creationism theory. Another example is 458

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the “voice” of the professor or of the author of a coursebook, which might implicitly be present in a conversation, having echoes in utterances, even if he/she is not actually a participant. In collaborative learning chat sessions, we consider that repeated words or phrases are probably debated ideas; they are candidates to become voices, which enter into debates with other voices: The idea is a live event … In this respect the idea is similar to the word, with which it is dialogically united. Like the word, the idea wants to be heard, understood and ‘answered’ by other voices, from other positions. Like the word, the idea is by nature dialogic. (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 88) For example, in Figure 31.2 three candidates for voices may be identified: “reply”, “topic” and “(re)presentation”. Like in the musical case, a voice may be also a group of individuals (musical instruments, respectively human, for example a group of students in a classroom or on the Internet). A voice may be, in the polyphonic model, also a gesture, for example, a student or a group of students that looks down when the teacher poses a question or a class of students that, at a given moment, start whispering (Trausan-Matu, 2013). An utterance is emitted by a person, and it may contain several voices, echoes of other voices or be emitted through a ventriloquism phenomenon (someone that speaks with the voice of another person): “a significant number of words can be identified that are implicitly or explicitly admitted as someone else’s, and that are transmitted by a variety of different means” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 354).

Figure 31.2 Candidates for voices.

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It should be emphasized that, in Bakhtin’s sense, utterances should also be considered in a generalized sense: they might be a sentence, a phrase and even a word or a gesture, and on the other side of the spectrum, a book or a whole theory.

Longitudinal and transversal links among voices Among utterances that articulate a voice, several kinds of links may be detected, on two orthogonal axes: explicit vs. implicit and longitudinal vs. transversal. Links are explicit when the utterer shows without doubt to which previous utterance it refers, for example, by naming the receiver (for example, “@john … ”) or by using a referencing facility, like that provided in the chat platform used in the Virtual Math Teams project (Stahl, 2009), which had the facility that, if a user wants to explicitly show that he/she refers to a previous utterance, he/she may click on that utterance, this explicit link being recorded (Holmer, Kienle & Wessner, 2006). For example, in Figure 31.3, the “Ref ” column contains the number (“Nr”) of the referenced utterance. John (at utterance number 19) uses this facility to answer to both Tim (utterance number 17) and (at utterance 20) to Adrian (utterance number 18) at an interval of 6 seconds and (at utterance 21) immediately continuing his reply to Adrian. An important effect of explicit referencing is that multiple parallel threads of discussion during the conversation may exist (possibly very hard to have in a face-to-face or phone conversation, where only one person may take the floor at a time), boosting the polyphonic weaving. Another important effect of this explicit referencing is that the computer-based analysis of the interanimation is facilitated, reducing the number of links among utterances that should be detected. In the polyphonic model, links (both explicit and implicit) may be longitudinal or transversal, similarly with, respectively, melodies or chords in the musical case. In the first case, they are continuations of the same voice, its echoes and ventriloquism. Transversal links occur between different voices in the same utterance or between different utterances.

Divergences/dissonances vs. convergences/consonances Transversal links may be divergent or convergent. Divergent and convergent links are similar to what Bakhtin called “anacrisis” and “syncrisis”, the main ways used by Socrates in his maieutic methodology for giving birth to truth: The two basic devices of the Socratic dialogue were the syncrisis and the anacrisis. Syncrisis was understood as the juxtaposition of various points of view on a specific object … Anacrisis was understood as a means for eliciting and provoking the words of one’s interlocutor, forcing him to express his opinion and express it thoroughly … Anacrisis is the provocation of the word by the word … Syncrisis and anacrisis dialogize thought, they carry it into the open, turn it into a rejoinder, attach it to dialogic

Figure 31.3 The explicit referencing facility.

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intercourse among people. Both of these devices have their origin in the notion of the dialogic nature of truth, which lies at the base of the Socratic dialogue. (Bakhtin, 1984, pp. 110–111) Convergent links (syncrisis) may drive to the unification of voices or to the recognition that they can co-occur (at least for the moment) without a conflict. Divergent links, (anacrisis) “the provocation of the word by the word”, have a great importance because, similarly to the divergent step in creativity processes, they create a fertile ground for new ideas. Moreover, like dissonances in music, divergences generate a need for consonances: “Whatever the number of voices, the character of a polyphonic composition depends crucially on how it uses and resolves dissonances” (Pesic, 2017). Such a phenomenon was identified in texts by Bakhtin and compared to centripetal/centrifugal forces in physics (Bakhtin, 1981).

Interanimation The “provocation of the word by the word” that defines anacrisis, and its dialog with syncrisis, as mentioned by Bakhtin, provide a good image of what we call “interanimation”. For a successful collaborative learning session, it is desired that the participants are involving themselves and that the topics to be discussed are debated intensely, which means divergences eventually followed by convergences should be present. The succession of the two kinds of transversal links suggests an interanimation phenomenon: “Within the arena of almost every utterance an intense interaction and struggle between one’s own and another’s word is being waged, a process in which they oppose or dialogically interanimate each other” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 354). An interesting pattern (found also in, for example, Brahms’ symphonies, where, repeatedly, groups of instruments continue the melodic line of others), which reflects a strong interanimation by several successive convergences, is what Mercer (2000) calls “cumulative talk” and Sacks “collaborative utterances”, exemplified as follows. Joe: (cough) We were in an automobile discussion, Henry: discussing the psychological motives for Mel: drag racing on the streets (Sacks 1992, pp.144–145) In conversations, involvement and, inherently, interanimation are enhanced by repetitions and rhythm (Tannen, 2007), if they are not monopolized by a single voice. The same happens in polyphonic music, where the starting theme is replayed by each voice, with variations, repeated many times. In collaborative learning conversations, tempos such as like “andante”,“allegro”, etc. were identified (Ligorio & Ritella, 2010).

The polyphonic analysis method and its computerized support The polyphonic analysis method presented herein considers the interactions and the discourse built in collaborative learning dialogs from the perspective of the polyphonic model, presented in the preceding sections. The first main goal of the analysis is the identification of the interanimation of voices, as a feature of the polyphonic discourse building, a desirable characteristic of the collaborative learning sessions. A second important goal is the detection of the contributions of each participant in the dialogs. The analysis method was used in several projects, for analysing various types of conversations: chat sessions performed during the Virtual Math Teams project at 461

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Drexel University (Stahl, 2009; Trausan-Matu & Rebedea, 2009) and at the Computer Science Department of the University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania (Trausan-Matu et al., 2014), discussion forums at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Manchester, UK (TrausanMatu et al., 2014) and face-to-face collaboration in a Japanese class (Trausan-Matu, 2013). The analysis method has seven steps, aiming to identify: 1) the main concepts discussed in the collaborative session, 2) verbal and non-verbal utterances, 3) explicit and implicit links, 4) voices in the generalized sense discussed previously, 5) divergences and convergences between voices, 6) interanimation and 7) discourse building and metrics. Each step of the analysis may be assisted by computer tools, using Natural Language Processing (NLP), graph algorithms, statistics and graphical visualizations for the identification of the previously enumerated elements and for providing metrics, statistics and visualisations. Several systems were developed for supporting the polyphonic analysis of CSCL chats, transcribed face-to-face conversations and discussion forums: Polyphony (Trausan, Rebedea, Dragan & Alexandru, 2007), PolyCAFe (Trausan-Matu et al., 2014) and the open source system ReaderBench (Dascalu, Dessus, Trausan-Matu, Bianco & Nardy, 2013), available also online (http://readerbench.com/). The first step of the analysis has as its goal the delimitation of the main concepts.These are the concepts that students had to debate, and concepts introduced in discussion by the participants. The concepts from the first category are explicitly stated before the collaborative learning session. The identification of the second category of concepts from the text logs may be done manually or using NLP techniques: starting from the most used words (after eliminating the so-called “stop-words”, such as “the”, “a”, “in”, “but”, etc., stemming – eliminating suffixes – and keeping only frequent remaining stems) and computing frequency-based metric Tf*Idf ( Jurafsky & Martin, 2009). In the second step, in logs of online sessions (chats or forums), each submitted intervention is considered a verbal utterance. In the case of face-to-face conversations, utterances may be delimited by the change of the speaker. Non-verbal utterances may be gestures of the participants, identified from the video recordings, for example, changing the gaze when asked a question (Trausan-Matu, 2013). For the third step, explicit links are easily obtained if a referencing facility is provided, as discussed in the “Longitudinal and transversal links among voices” section. Implicit links may be detected either manually, by inspecting the log, or with NLP techniques, considering, in pairs of utterances at a short distance: repeated words or phrases, co-references (Jurafsky & Martin, 2009), lexical chains – sequences of semantically related words (Budanitsky & Hirst, 2006), adjacency pairs, argumentation links, discourse markers, etc. A graph is constructed with utterances as nodes, arcs being the explicit and implicit links. The detection of candidates for voices starts from the main concepts defined or identified in the first step, followed by identification of semantic groupings: Latent Semantic Analysis – (LSA) (Landauer & Dumais, 1997), topics detected with Latent Dirichlet Allocation – (LDA) (Blei, Ng & Jordan, 2003) or lexical chains (Jurafsky & Martin, 2009). PolyCAFe uses Tf*Idf and LSA. ReaderBench uses Tf*Idf, LSA, LDA and lexical chains. To be validated as voices, good indicators might be if they have a rhythmicity in a segment of the conversation or a regular distribution along the dialog. Therefore, paths of longitudinal links containing these concepts in the constructed graph that satisfy the previous requirements are considered. Identification of divergences and convergences between voices is the subject of the fifth step. Transversal links are identified from the presence of discourse markers (such as “but”, “nevertheless”, “different”, “same”, “also”, “other”, etc.) and adjacency pairs. For example, in Figure 31.4, the marker “but” in utterance 30 indicates a divergence. The target of this transversal link is obviously the explicitly referenced utterance 27. Because the voices “topic” and “reply” are 462

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Figure 31.4 Divergences and convergences.

echoed in these utterances, it is rather clear that there is a divergence among these two voices. Immediately a convergence appears between voices “topic” and “(re)presentation”, signaled by the discourse marker “also” in utterance 34 and its explicit link towards utterance 30. A second divergence is a few utterances later.This sequence of divergences and convergences is an indicator of interanimation, which is an indicator of a good collaboration. Polyphony is not an unrelated presence of divergences and convergences between several voices. There should be an interanimation among voices, which may be detected when specific combinations of divergences and combination occur between ideas/voices. For example, in Figure 31.5, a sequence of divergences and convergences suggests that interanimation is present. However, to become polyphonic, interanimation should eventually be concluded with convergences that mark the process of discourse/knowledge building. The last step concludes the analysis considering aspects of discourse building: meaning making, identification of artifacts in problem solving, investigating pivotal moments, rhythm, collaboration regions, assessing learners’ participation and the collaboration of the team as a whole. Numerical values (metrics) are computed as evaluations for participation, contribution to content and collaboration. In this aim, statistical analyses are combined with Social Networks Analysis (Brandes, 2001; Dascalu et al., 2013; Trausan-Matu et al., 2014), semantical analysis and polyphony-based techniques considering distribution of voices and their interanimation. PolyCAFe and ReaderBench provide various graphical representations of the explicit and implicit links, distribution of voices and interanimation. For example, Figure 31.6 presents a comparative visualization done by PolyCAFe of voices “chat”, “forum”, “wiki” and “blog” of two chats where students had to discuss collaborative technologies. A higher degree of interanimation in the chat can be seen from the upper part of the figure. PolyCAFe provides also textual feedback for students about their participation in the collaborative session. 463

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Figure 31.5 Interanimation among voices “reply”, “topic” and “(re)presentation”.

Figure 31.6 A comparative visualization of the evolution of voices in two chats, done with PolyCAFe.

Both PolyCAFe and ReaderBench compute and visualize a metric of collaboration, as is shown in Figure 31.7. This visualization empowers users (teachers and students) to have a quick image of how the collaboration evolved in time and to compare the performance of different groups of students.

Conclusions This chapter presented in detail the ideas behind the introduction of the polyphonic model of discourse generated in dialogical collaborative learning sessions and its operationalization using NLP for analysing collaboration in CSCL. A driving idea of the approach is the strong connection between music, especially polyphonic jazz, natural language and collaboration. 464

Figure 31.7 A comparative representation of the evolution of collaboration computed with ReaderBench.

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Several other approaches for analysing collaborative learning conversations were presented in the chapter. In addition, other important approaches should be mentioned, most of them including computer support systems. From the perspective of the Conversation Analysis domain, Zemel and colleagues (2009) studied interleaved coherent long sequences in collaborative learning chats. They might be viewed as voices in the polyphonic model, but nothing is discussed about the interactions among them. An approach which has some common points with the polyphonic model was developed by Suthers and Desiato (2012). Two central concepts in their approach are the contingency and the uptake. In our terminology contingencies are candidates for implicit links and uptakes are explicit and effective implicit links. The approach of Suthers is centered on uptakes while the polyphonic analysis is focused on voices and interanimation. Moreover, disjunctive links are not uptakes. Knowledge Space Visualizer uses LSA for the analysis and various visualizations of text generated during a CSCL session (Teplovs, 2008). The same technology is used by Dong (2005) for analysing design team communication. Computer-based systems that analyse collaborative learning chats or forums are oftentimes based on the code-and-count idea (codification of utterances and then performing some statistics [Strijbos, 2009]), on simple statistics, machine learning or use NLP techniques.The latter are usually based on the bag-of-words idea, which means they do not consider the order of words in texts. From the polyphonic modeling perspective, they only may identify potential voices starting from the most used words, but in order to identify if candidates are really voices, some other analysis should be performed: first, a repeated word or phrase is considered a potential voice if it appears as a thread of a long duration during the chat, not only in a short segment. Synonyms or semantically closed related words may be included into the thread (the so-called lexical chains [Budanitsky & Hirst, 2006]). Second, it is expected that voices (words or phrases) are echoed, which means they are uttered by more than one participant. Third, interanimation patterns should be present among voices (Trausan-Matu, Stahl & Sarmiento, 2007). However, a deep automatic analysis of collaboration is not (yet?) possible, because state-ofthe-art NLP and machine learning techniques cannot enter in the deepness of textual discourse. It is very hard to detect all relevant links between utterances, for example irony, allusions, insinuations, etc., making it in some cases impossible to detect all the divergences and convergences. However, the computer tools already available can be used by humans for successfully analysing CSCL conversations in order to detect how collaboration evolved in time and how much each participant contributed to the joint knowledge building.

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The polyphonic model Chiu, M.M. (2013). Social metacognition, micro-creativity and justifications: Statistical discourse analysis of a mathematics classroom conversation. In D. Suthers, K. Lund, C.P. Rosé, C. Teplovs & N. Law (Eds.) Productive Multivocality in the Analysis of Collaborative Learning (pp. 141–160). New York: Springer. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Dascalu, M., Dessus, P., Trausan-Matu, S., Bianco, M., & Nardy, A. (2013). ReaderBench, an environment for analyzing text complexity and reading strategies. In H.C. Lane, K.Yacef, J. Mostow & P. Pavlik (Eds.), 16th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2013) (pp. 379–388). Memphis, TN: Springer. Dong, A. (2005). The latent semantic approach to studying design team communication. Design Studies, 26(5), 445–461. Fux, J.J. (1966). Gradus Ad Parnassum. Monuments of Music and Music Literature. New York: Broude Brothers. Facsimile of the 1725 Vienna edition. Holmer, T., Kienle, A., & Wessner, M. (2006). Explicit referencing in learning chats: Needs and acceptance. In W. Nejdl & K. Tochtermann (Eds.), First European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2006 (pp. 170–184). Crete, Greece: Springer. Joshi, M., & Rosé, C.P. (2007). Using transactivity in conversation summarization in educational dialog. In SLaTE Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education. Farmington, PA. Jurafsky, D., & Martin, J.H. (2009). Speech and Language Processing:An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, and Computational Linguistics (2nd edn). Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice-Hall. Koschmann, T. (1999). Toward a dialogic theory of learning: Bakhtin’s contribution to learning in settings of collaboration. In Proceedings of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Conference (CSCL ‘99) (pp. 308–313). Palo Alto, CA. Kuhn, T.S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (PDF) (1st edn, p. 3). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Landauer,T.K., & Dumais, S.T. (1997). A solution to Plato’s problem:The latent semantic analysis theory of acquisition, induction and representation of knowledge. Psychological Review, 104(2), 211–240. Levitin, D. (2006). This is Your Brain on Music.The Science of a Human Obsession. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Ligorio, M.B., & Ritella, G. (2010). The collaborative construction of chronotopes during computer-supported collaborative professional tasks. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 5(4), 433–452. Mercer, N. (2000). Words and Minds. How We Use Language to Think Together: London: Routledge. Pesic, P. (2017). Polyphonic Minds. Music of the Hemispheres. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rosé, C.P., Wang, Y.C., Cui, Y., Arguello, J., Stegmann, K., Weinberger, A., & Fischer, F. (2008). Analyzing collaborative learning processes automatically: Exploiting the advances of computational linguistics in computer-supported collaborative learning. International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, 3(3), 237–271. Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell. Sacks, O. (2007). Musicophilia:Tales of Music and the Brain. New York:Vintage Books. Sawyer, R.K. (2003). Group Creativity: Music, Theater, Collaboration, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. Sfard, A. (2000). On reform movement and the limits of mathematical discourse. Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 2(3), 157–189. Stahl, G. (2006). Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stahl, G. (2009). Studying Virtual Math Teams. New York: Springer. Strijbos, J.W. (2009). A multidimensional coding scheme for VMT. In G. Stahl (Ed.), Studying Virtual Math Teams (pp. 399–419). Boston, MA: Springer. Suthers, D., & Desiato, C. (2012). Exposing chat features through analysis of uptake between contributions. In 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 3368–3377). Maui, HI: IEEE. Tannen, D. (2007). Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Teplovs, C. (2008). The knowledge space visualizer: A tool for visualizing online discourse. In Workshop on A Common Framework for CSCL Interaction Analysis, ICLS 2008 (p. 12). Utrecht, Netherland. Trausan-Matu, S. (2010).The polyphonic model of hybrid and collaborative learning. In F.Wang, L., J. Fong. & R.C. Kwan (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Hybrid Learning Models: Advanced Tools, Technologies, and Applications (pp. 466–486). Hershey, NY: Information Science Publishing.

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32 PROGRESSIVE DIALOGUE IN COMPUTER-SUPPORTED COLLABORATIVE KNOWLEDGE BUILDING Carol K. K. Chan, Yuyao Tong and Jan van Aalst

Introduction The importance of educational dialogue in promoting learning, thinking and understanding is recognized widely (Alexander, 2017; Howe & Abedin, 2013; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Wegerif, 2013). Recently, there have been major developments examining the mediating role of digital technology in dialogic processes (Major, Warwick, Rasmussen, Ludvigsen, & Cook, 2018), for example, the use of interactive whiteboards (Hennessy, 2011), table tops (Falloon & Khoo, 2014; Haßler, Major & Hennessy, 2016), microblogging (Cook, Warwick, Vrikki, Major, & Wegerif, 2019) and wiki-supported tools for knowledge construction (Pifarré & Staarman, 2011). Research has shown how meaning is generated through dialogue and how technology can create and open up a “dialogic space” (Wegerif, 2007) for inter-thinking (Littleton & Mercer, 2013). New technology not only makes it possible for dialogue to transcend time and space but also provides opportunities for dialogue to be dynamic, creative and transforming. A major research area, computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), provides a rich paradigm for examining technology-supported dialogue. Stahl, Cress, Ludvigsen and Law (2014) discussed how dialogicality provides a new theoretical lens for conceptualizing collaboration; reciprocally, CSCL technology contexts enable new forms of dialogue to emerge and raises new questions (see Major & Warwick, Chapter 27 in this volume). CSCL researchers have postulated different theories and metaphors of learning (Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2005), including knowledge acquisition, social acculturation and knowledge creation, the latter examining the creation of knowledge within and across communities (see Ligorio, Amenduni & McLay, Chapter 35 in this volume). This chapter aims to examine dialogue for creative knowledge work extending from groups to communities. This chapter examines knowledge building (KB) (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003; 2006; 2014), which has been considered one of the exemplary dialogic approaches in CSCL research (Wegerif, 2007, p. 310).The KB model, also known as knowledge creation (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2014), involves participants’ collective efforts and progressive dialogue in adding value to and extending the knowledge frontiers of their community. In KB classrooms, students collectively generate problems, co-construct explanations, revise their theories and pursue sustained inquiry through 469

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online and offline discourse. Aligned with how technology enables the shift from teacher- to student-directed learning (Major & Warwick, Chapter 27 in this volume; Staarman & Ametller, Chapter 34 in this volume), KB highlights students’ contributions to community advancement. KB progressive dialogue involves students’ collective epistemic agency and progressive inquiry (Hakkarainen, 2003; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006) – when one problem has been solved via dialogue, students collectively invest their efforts to solve emergent new problems progressively in ways similar to scientific dialogue in scientific communities. Progressive dialogue is central to the KB model and supported by Knowledge Forum® (KF). Although KB is primarily a dialogic model, few research efforts have examined dialogic education from a KB perspective. This chapter aims to situate KB with other dialogic approaches, examining how progressive dialogue can be conceptualized, assessed and developed in technology-supported classrooms. We first discuss the centrality and nature of progressive dialogue in the knowledge age using the theoretical lens of KB. Second, we discuss KF affordances for supporting progressive dialogue. Third, we examine how progressive online dialogue can be analysed and the roles of dialogic moves in conceptual learning. Fourth, we discuss dialogic pedagogy in KB classrooms, highlighting key design principles. Finally, future research directions for examining dialogic approaches using the KB lens are discussed. Most KB literature uses the term “discourse” to emphasize written discourse on KF; however, as KB involves different forms of dialogue beyond written texts, the term “dialogic moves” has also been employed (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2016). In this chapter, discourse and dialogue are used synonymously.

Theoretical underpinning of knowledge building as a dialogic approach Dialogic literacy is a fundamental goal for educated citizenry in our globalized world and knowledge-based society (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2005). In the knowledge era, students need to develop productive dialogue to inquire, to innovate and to engage in creative knowledge work (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2005). KB examines how people work together to advance the state of community knowledge (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006; 2014); the goal of progressive KB dialogue is to generate and improve existing community knowledge. To support progressive dialogue, Scardamalia and Bereiter developed the Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environment (CSILE), one of the first CSCL platforms, in the late 1980s, followed by Knowledge Forum (KF) in 1997, which has undergone continual development since then. Research in the last three decades has shown how students can engage in productive discourse in KB with demonstrated evidence of students’ conceptual learning and knowledge advance (see review, Chan, 2013; Chen & Hong, 2016). There are many different meanings of “dialogic,” and research on productive dialogue has different emphases (Wegerif, 2011). A major research area in dialogic education has examined classroom dialogues – the promotion of dialogues as chains of questions and the exploration of ideas through teacher–student dialogues (Alexander, 2017; Mercer, 1995; Resnick, Asterhan & Clarke, 2015); the characterization of classroom dialogue is a major theme (Howe & Abedin, 2013). Alexander (2017; 2018) postulated “dialogic teaching,” for harnessing the power of talk to stimulate student thinking involving teacher–student co-construction and negotiation of knowledge. Michaels, O’Connor and Resnick (2008) discussed “accountable talk,” emphasizing different dialogic practices and students’ community accountability. Mercer (1995; 1996) identified three distinctive kinds of classroom talk, including disputational, cumulative and exploratory talk. Productive classroom dialogue, also called exploratory talk, involves students’ joint reasoning and engaging constructively with each other’s ideas for knowledge construction (Mercer & Littleton, 2007). 470

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The role of dialogue in influencing thinking, learning to learn and creativity is another major research theme (Wegerif, 2011; 2015). Using a Bakhtinian perspective, Wegerif (2007) argued that learning to think involves engaging students in dialogic processes, drawing together multiple perspectives and seeing others’ viewpoints; this meeting of different and conflictual perspectives brings about emergent understanding. Researchers have examined how technology plays a central role that enables dialogue to be externalized for reflection, opening, deepening and broadening the dialogic spaces (Major et al., 2018; Wegerif, 2007). Wegerif (2007) argued that dialogue is key – not just as a means for constructing knowledge, but an end in itself. Similarly, Mercer and Littleton (2007) postulated that students not only learn through dialogue but also for dialogue. The KB model resembles current dialogic approaches – for example, principles of collective work, reciprocity, support, building on and accountability to one’s community (Michaels et al., 2008) are advocated through KB’s focus on collective responsibility. KB addresses similar issues as do dialogic researchers – Bereiter (2005) discussed the “mind as container” problem in education. Like the notions that dialogue is never closed and that what constitutes knowledge is never final (Wegerif, 2011), KB progressive dialogue can be characterized as dialogue that generates more dialogue, knowledge that creates more knowledge (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2014). Primarily, KB seeks to extend dialogue from knowledge construction to dialogue for creative knowledge work in scientific communities. Drawing from historical development, Bereiter and Scardamalia (2005) argued that dialogue underpins all knowledge disciplines and is pivotal in contributing to the development of scientific and systematic knowledge in our cultural heritage. In a similar vein, dialogue is important in innovative and progressive organizations in the knowledge-based era – new knowledge and new directions are also forged through dialogue. Bereiter and Scardamalia argued that such dialogue typically goes beyond reasoning, debates and persuasion (general rhetoric) to include explanatory coherence and progressive problem solving for the generation of new ideas. Productive dialogue, using the KB perspective, has an epistemic focus highlighting community dynamics – emphasis is placed on the collective progress of dialogue for idea improvement and knowledge generation. The key argument is that, for creative knowledge work, students in the knowledge era need to be provided opportunities to engage in dialogue similar to that found in knowledge disciplines and innovative communities. Supported by design and technology, school-aged students can work in similar ways as scientists and innovators, pushing the frontiers of knowledge of their community through progressive discourse (see review, Chen & Hong, 2016). Like scientific progress, KB progressive dialogue is ever-deepening, involving collective epistemic work to turn fragmented explanations into coherent theories for creative knowledge work. KB dialogue aligns with multiple perspectives, but it also involves students’ collective agency combining diverse perspectives into higher-level, coherent perspectives. Two key epistemic dimensions of KB theory characterize KB progressive dialogue. The first is the distinction between learning for individual growth and KB for the development of public knowledge (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006; 2014). Bereiter incorporated the World Three idea from Popper’s theory of objective (public) knowledge; students not only learn existing curriculum knowledge, they are also engaged in the process of improving and generating new knowledge for their community. Similar to dialogic theory, which emphasizes dialogue with infinite others in the cultural heritage (Wegerif, 2011), KB dialogue aims to advance the frontiers of public-collective knowledge of the community, much as scientists historically do. Although school-aged children cannot create new knowledge unknown to human kind, they can engage in the process of knowledge creation used by scientists via progressive dialogue. For example, 471

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Scardamalia and Bereiter (2006) referred to a student’s KF online post (“Mendel worked on Karen’s problem”) to show how these children viewed that they were not just learning curriculum knowledge about genetics; Karen and others had joined ranks with Mendel to create public knowledge for their peers, pushing the frontiers of public knowledge of their communities. The second epistemic dimension is the distinction between “belief-mode” and “designmode” dialogue, both important in different ways. Belief-mode dialogue is concerned with how students make claims, justify their beliefs and reason to support their arguments, as reflected in such questions in classroom dialogue as “Can you elaborate what you mean?,” “What are your reasons?” and “Can you provide evidence?” KB adds another dimension – design-mode dialogue – that involves theory-building and helping students to see ideas as conceptual artefacts for improvement (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2003). Design-mode dialogue may include questions such as “What can be a better explanation and how would you revise your ideas?,” “How do you synthesize these different ideas to improve the explanation?” and “What have we accomplished together and what new problems/questions have emerged?” Design-mode dialogue, like scientific dialogue, aims at bootstrapping to higher-level knowledge. Each episode opens new problems/possibilities; when a problem is solved, efforts are reinvested to tackle deeper problems. While both modes of dialogue are important, design-mode dialogue has been examined less in classroom talk, and with emerging technology, these new forms of dialogues for knowledge generation need to be examined. While the term knowledge advance in KB is often used, the focus is not on knowledge content as the end-state – KB is synonymous with the continued pursuit of inquiry and evolution of dialogue. Progressive KB dialogue features several key epistemic commitments: (a) seeking collective progress beyond sharing, building on and evaluating ideas; (b) developing rise-above beyond compromised and common understanding; and (c) formulating meta-dialogue that tracks community progress for sustained growth. KB progressive dialogue is purposeful but has no fixed goal and is ever-deepening; its goals evolve as the dialogue proceeds. The ability to sustain deepening, purposeful dialogue is important for dialogic literacy in the knowledge age. The KB model is well aligned with dialogic theory emphasizing students taking up multiple perspectives (Wegerif, 2011) – the KB emphasis on a community context and public knowledge can help further to maximize bringing together these multiple perspectives and diverse models. In alignment with the meeting of minds/perspectives for new ideas, the KB principles of collective epistemic agency and design mode advocate students taking responsibility for idea improvement that can propel the emergence of new ideas and ever-deepening dialogue. While the notion of “collective” has been emphasized in dialogic and CSCL research (e.g., group cognition, Stahl, 2006), the KB model focuses more explicitly on collective progress as in knowledge creation in scientific dialogue. Productive dialogue can be enhanced in a community context with the continued pursuit of collective idea improvement supported by technology.

Technological affordances of Knowledge Forum for progressive dialogue Digital technology plays a pivotal role with different affordances in supporting productive online/classroom dialogue (Major & Warwick, Chapter 27 in this volume). Knowledge Forum (KF) is central, and it has been evolving with the KB model over the past two decades. Its digital technologies are designed to support progressive dialogue for creative knowledge work. We first introduce the key features of KF (see Figure 32.1) and the general technology affordances for productive dialogue (Hennessy, 2011). We then illustrate specific KF technology affordances linked to KB principles and KB dialogic pedagogy. 472

Figure 32.1 Features of Knowledge Forum supporting progressive dialogue. Note: (1) View (top): the collaborative workspace where students contribute and build-on these Notes for dialogic inquiry; (2) A KF Note (bottom left) with Scaffolds, keywords and reference Notes for theory-building dialogue; and (3) Embedded Assessment Tools (bottom right) for concurrent feedback on KF activity and dialogue.

Carol K. K. Chan, Yuyao Tong and Jan van Aalst

Features of Knowledge Forum and affordances for productive dialogue KF View. The basic unit in KF is a “View”: a collaborative dialogic workspace where students contribute their questions and ideas and build on others’ ideas (see Figure 32.1, top). Students can contribute “Notes” to different Views that reflect the community’s core ideas and progress. Views make ideas public, allowing students to refine ideas and reformulate problems in a community dialogue.The View background is designed not as a bulletin board but as a graphic space that can be co-designed by teacher and students as the dialogue proceeds. The grouping of KF Notes also opens up dialogic space for developing emergent and higher-level conceptualization of knowledge. Notes and Scaffolds. A Note and networks of Notes (see red icons in Figure 32.1, top) are idea objects and build-on structures displayed in the View. Students can write or co-author Notes, which can include questions, statements, build-ons, evidence, plans and graphics. When writing a KF Note, students can use “Scaffolds” – metacognitive prompts that support their dialogic inquiry (e.g., “I need to understand,” “My theory,” “New information,” “A better theory,” “Putting our ideas together,” etc.) (see Figure 32.1, bottom left). Teachers/students can add or modify Scaffolds for different curriculum contexts. KF Notes can be edited, revised and annotated for idea improvement. Keywords can be added to facilitate searches and to focus on key domain words in enriching the dialogue. Linking and Rise-Above. KF features include support for linking and rise-above for KB progressive dialogue.The networked build-on Note structure, unlike the downward sequence common in online forums, facilitates the multiple linking of Notes to Views and sub-views (see Figure 32.1, top) and moving notes around to allow ideas/questions to be posed in different Views (contexts). Rise-above processes, using “Reference Notes,” enable students to cite others’ ideas, with hyperlinks to the original Notes (see Figure 32.1, bottom left), similar to what scholars do in disciplinary inquiry. Students can also use “rise-above Notes” and “rise-above Views” (a View of Views) to synthesize a cluster of notes or combine promising ideas into another higher-level view, thus helping students work towards synthesizing higher-level knowledge and deepening dialogue. Assessment and Analytic Tools. Accompanying KF is a set of assessment and learning analytics tools that record students’ online activities and dialogues such as Note contributions, interactivity (social network analysis), use of Scaffolds and lexical analysis for vocabulary growth (see Figure 32.1, bottom right). Knowledge builders monitor their work and engage in self/collective assessment of their progress in their dialogue. Different new analytics tools (e.g., Knowledge Building Discourse Explorer (KBDeX), Oshima, Oshima, & Matsuzawa, 2012) can capture temporal dimensions of students’ dialogue on KF. Presenting analytic evidence of their KF online writing and dialogue can help students to engage in reflective dialogue (e.g., are we building onto others and what next?), thus helping them deepen their dialogue. Different kinds of affordances have been identified using CSCL tools to enhance dialogue (Hennessy, 2011; Major et al., 2018). Similarly, KF technology provides technology-enhanced affordances, including: (a) Visibility – Views are open collaborative spaces wherein students’ ideas are foreground, juxtaposed, connected and compared and provide visualization of on-going dialogue and community progress; (b) Provisionality – students can revise KF Notes any time, thus supporting the progressive nature of dialogue; (c) Interactivity – Notes can be moved via KF’s flexible-build-on structure, a non-linear mode that enriches interactivity, allowing students to link and develop ideas into more coherent lines of thinking and discourse; (d) Multimodality – KF includes different modalities (i.e., text, graphics, video), allowing multiple diverse interpretations to open richer dialogue; (e) Trajectory and history – KF’s networks of Notes/ 474

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ideas, including their posting/revision history, can be tracked via KF’s assessment tools; and (f) Revisiting and repositioning – KF allows ideas to be modified in different ways, with rise-above Views facilitating the reformulation and emergence of new ideas and multiple perspectives.

KF technology affordance aligned with KB principles and KB dialogic pedagogy While technology affordances are important, dialogic intentions and pedagogy play pivotal roles in digital environments (Mercer, Hennessy & Warwick, 2010). To help researchers and teachers work with KB, Scardamalia (2002) postulated 12 KB principles, as indicators of knowledge building. This set of principles also represents the dialogic intentions and goals of the KB community. Table 32.1 shows how KF affordances for productive dialogue align with KB principles and pedagogy. While the KB principles overlap somewhat, each has a distinctive focus. Several are critical for productive KB dialogue: (a) collective responsibility and agency; (b) idea improvement; (c) rising-above and emergence; and (d) reflective/transformative assessment. These principles are dialogic intentions that help students to develop collective dialogic orientations, which are important for opening dialogic space for progressive dialogue. The analysis of technology affordance (Hennessy, 2011), elaborated with the alignment with KB principles and pedagogy, illuminates how KF technology supports progressive dialogue for creative knowledge work. KF’s affordances for productive dialogue are enhanced continually through newly developed assessment tools and analytics in new versions of Knowledge Forum.

Analysis of progressive dialogue in knowledge building In knowledge building, KF technology not only provides affordances enabling progressive dialogue, digitally mediated dialogue on KF also demonstrates collective conceptual artefacts (Hennessy, 2011) and productive knowledge work. This section examines how online KF progressive dialogue is examined, including coding schemes for the characteristics of productive online KB dialogue and evidence of conceptual learning (for evidence, see also Chan, 2013; Chen & Hong, 2016). Earlier research analysing online KB dialogue has used coding methods to examine progressive inquiry emphasizing theory building. Hakkarainen (2003) postulated “depth of inquiry” and examined KF discourse in terms of whether young students can pursue problems and build explanations as scientists do. Coding of online KF dialogue as different levels of explanatory discourse moves was related to students’ conceptual progress (Hakkarainen, 2003), evidencing productive moves. Continuing this theme, recent research has identified a set of productive online dialogue moves, including the “uptake” of new ideas, problematizing information, tackling conflict, deepening explanations and sustained questioning. Analysis has provided evidence showing how different theory-building dialogic moves predict science learning in fifth-grade students (Lin & Chan, 2018). Analysis of online KF discourse using the theory-building lens has continued to be prominent in KB research and has been examined according to the “Ways of Contribution” scheme (Chuy et al., 2011). This coding scheme identifies different categories of dialogic moves including: questioning (formulating an explanatory/design question); theorizing (proposing, supporting, improving and/or seeking an alternative explanation); obtaining information (asking for information, designing experiments to test hypotheses, introducing sources); working with information (providing information to support/discard a theory, weighing/accounting for conflicting

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Table 32.1 KB principles, technology affordances and dialogic pedagogy for progressive dialogue Knowledge building principles

KF technology affordances

KB dialogic pedagogy

Students engage in classroom KF View provides a collective Real ideas and authentic dialogue to generate problems; dialogic space for contribution of problems. Knowledge post problems/questions on questions and ideas; build-on Note problems arise from students’ KF (e.g., Why do leaves change structure supports inquiry into efforts to understand the colour?); tackle deep problems key problems; Scaffolds such as “I world with sustained pursuit beyond text-book tasks and need to understand” highlight key into the problems. pursue sustained inquiry. problems. Students build on, revisit and revise KF Notes can be revised, annotated Improvable ideas. All ideas ideas for theory building via and revisited; Scaffolds such as “my are viewed as improvable; KF/classroom dialogue, reflect theory” and “a better theory” continual efforts to work on on what has been accomplished support theory revision; Rise-above the quality, coherence and and identify promising ideas for Notes/Views support higher-level utility of ideas. deepening dialogue. idea formulation; Assessment tools provide feedback for refinement and idea development. KF scaffolds support theory building Students pursue problems in Epistemic agency. High-level dialogic inquiry using theoryand comparison of own, others’ agency negotiating the fit building scaffolds – grapple with and scientific ideas (e.g., INTU, between own and others’ their own ideas in relation to my theory, new information, ideas, using contrasts to peers’ ideas and scientific models a better theory); flexible Note spark change; take charge of and use differences to chart and View structures and linking high-level work including progress; take agency to generate support student agency across goal setting, monitoring and own problems and work towards contexts. evaluation. these goals. Students put forth diverse ideas Idea diversity. To understand an KF has different modalities (e.g., on KF using texts, graphics; graphics, video note) that support idea is to understand the ideas videos; seeding of multiple ideas different representations of ideas that surround it, including supported by classroom dialogue; and perspectives; multiple linking those that stand in contrast students articulate diverse and facilitates bringing together of to it. multiple problem-solving paths. diverse ideas; analytic tools show diversity and connectedness of ideas. KF rise-above Notes and Views embed Students write rise-above notes Rise-Above. Continually to synthesize diverse ideas multiple ideas for emergent goals working towards higher-level and create rise-above views and higher-level knowledge; KF formulation of problems to deepen dialogue; write Reference Notes include hyperlinks for synthesis and emergent KB portfolio using References to other KF Notes for synthesis. questions. function to incorporate (cite) and track other ideas for riseabove and synthesis. Students take collective agency Community knowledge/collective KF View supports and visualizes pursuing dialogue; collective community progress and state responsibility. All participants idea improvement as a classroom of knowledge; Note-linking, share high-level responsibility norm; opportunistic and search and rise-above support to contribute ideas to the emergent groups (not fixed continual refinement of collective community; awareness of state group); develop community dialogue; analytic tools help of community knowledge. awareness of cutting edge of monitor students’ contribution to knowledge. community.

Students incorporate new Constructive use of authoritative KF Scaffold “New Information” information to support their encourages use of source sources. theory-building dialogue; information and the search for Creative work requires use authoritative sources evidence to enrich dialogue; familiarity with current and constructively and critically different KF modalities support cutting-edge knowledge for theory revision; enrich bringing in different information; of the field; authoritative community dialogue through analytic tools test use of domain information examined bringing in diverse sources of terms and new information. combined with a critical information. stance. Students engage in KB classroom Flexible Note-structure and multipleKB discourse. Discursive talk regularly to reflect on KF linked views supports deepening practices with explicit goals dialogue; meta-talk helps them inquiry threads and emergent to advance knowledge to develop collective reflection goals; revision, reference and risebeyond sharing information; towards deepening their KB above features encourage students knowledge is transformed by discourse. to engage in transformative the discourse process. dialogue; analytic tools support viewing of discourse quality. Students engage in reflective KF assessment and analytic tools, Embedded, concurrent and assessment of KF work – write providing concurrent feedback, transformative assessment. KB portfolios to assess support monitoring and Continual assessment is community progress; employ improvement of ideas; reference central to community analytic-tools and engage in notes and rise-above support progress; assessment is analytics-supported dialogue assessment of community embedded in curriculum using concurrent feedback data progress. with concurrent feedback for to deepen their KF inquiry and transformative learning. dialogue. KF co-authored Notes support students Students valuing different ideas and Democratizing knowledge. everyone a valuable member; KB of different abilities to work All students are valued classroom culture encourages together; analytic tools, assessing contributors to the everyone to contribute; evenness of contributions and community; diversity is inclusivity emphasized: high and other indicators, can be examined considered as a strength and low achievers work together. for extent of distributed work. all are empowered to engage in knowledge work. Symmetric knowledge advance. KF View design and co-construction Students engage in cross-group/ community; KB dialogue Knowledge advancements of Views and databases can be inquiring into similar and related are symmetrical with supported within and between problems; virtual classroom visits; different parties across teams/ teams/communities; analytics shared expertise for advancing communities advancing tools demonstrate growth in knowledge. together. different communities. The KF database provides a community Students reflect explicitly on how Pervasive knowledge building. KB dialogue is applicable outside space that can be expandable to Knowledge building not the specific class to other areas different areas within and outside restricted to any specific within and beyond school school contexts that students see class; pervades mental life in contexts. relevant; KF database can be used and out of school context; as a resource for future work. knowledge building as a way of thinking and living.

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explanations, improving design); syntheses and analogies (synthesizing available ideas, creating analogies, initiating rise-above); and supporting discussion (using diagrams to communicate ideas). The scheme has been employed in various studies (Chen, Scardamalia, & Bereiter, 2015; Resendes, Scardamalia, Bereiter, Chen, & Halewood, 2015). demonstrating that even young students can engage in these productive dialogue moves in KB/KF environments with effects on their conceptual knowledge (Chen et al., 2015). Bereiter and Scardamalia (2016) focused specifically on constructive dialogic moves for knowledge creation that included problem definition, new ideas, promisingness evaluation, comparison, critical discourse, high-level ideas and meta-dialogue. These different dialogic moves aim to capture how scientists pursue inquiry and generate knowledge. One of these categories, meta-dialogue (dialogue about dialogue) – how students use the rise-above approach to synthesize the community dialogue and identify new problems for continued dialogue – may reflect the KB rise-above dialogic intentions but have been examined relatively less in CSCL schemes. Similar to what scholars do, students can engage in meta-dialogue (meta-review) to bootstrap their dialogue and collective knowledge.There is some initial evidence indicating that these meta-discourse moves may predict tertiary students’ conceptual advances in KB environments (Lei & Chan, 2018) A seminal dialogic scheme on classroom talk distinguishes between cumulative, disputational and exploratory talk (Mercer, 1995). Some similarities can be found between classroom talk and online discourse. Van Aalst (2009) distinguished three modes when analysing KF discourse: (1) knowledge-sharing mode (sharing of information/ideas with limited processing); (2) knowledge-construction mode (co-constructing knowledge through asking explanation questions, interpreting evidence, evaluating hypotheses); and (3) knowledge-building/-creation mode (pursuing promising ideas; sustaining questioning; awareness of state of community knowledge; meta-discourse). There are some similarities between cumulative talk with knowledge-sharing discourse with mere sharing of information, and exploratory talk with explanation-oriented knowledge-construction/knowledge-building discourse. KB mode also emphasizes rise-above and meta-discourse, focusing on students’ epistemic commitment to collective progress. Further work (Fu, van Aalst & Chan, 2016) extends the three-mode scheme identifying nine discourse patterns through analysing KF databases. These patterns are: (1) Knowledge-Sharing mode including (i) fact-oriented, (ii) cumulative, (iii) repetitive, (iv) simple argumentation and (v) disputational discourse; (2) Knowledge-Construction mode including (vi) explanatory and problem-centred inquiry and (vii) complex argumentation discourse; and (3) KnowledgeBuilding mode including (viii) progressive inquiry and (ix) sustained discourse for community advance. These diverse patterns reveal a range of approaches applicable to other kinds of online dialogue in online discussion. Analyses indicate that students using the more sophisticated modes also develop stronger conceptual knowledge (van Aalst, 2009). These systems of KB online dialogic moves help to illustrate the characteristics of progressive discourse postulated by KB theories and to assess whether productive KB dialogue is developing; they can also become goals and criteria for promoting productive dialogue supported by KB dialogic pedagogy.

Dialogic pedagogy for progressive dialogue in knowledge building Designing dialogic pedagogy for promoting creative knowledge work is an important theme for KB and dialogic education (see Pifarré, Chapter 29 in this volume). Research has indicated the difficulty of developing exploratory talk (Howe & Abedin, 2013). KB dialogic pedagogy, like other dialogic teaching approaches, emphasizes active student involvement as a collec478

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tive endeavour (Michaels et al., 2008), extended student contribution for co-construction of knowledge (Mercer, Hennessy & Warwick, 2010) and the use of ground rules and principles (Dawes, Mercer & Wegerif, 2004). KB dialogic pedagogy is to reflect and enact the theory of progressive dialogue emphasizing collective agency for idea improvement. Different approaches are developed to encourage exploratory and KB talk – the general KB pedagogy is introduced first, followed by a discussion of key pedagogical principles. In KB classrooms, students engage in creative knowledge work; dialogue is central, and online and offline dialogues are intertwined. Students often start by generating their own problems using face-to-face dialogic inquiry in the classroom, then record and work on their ideas on KF. Classroom inquiry frames their online dialogic work, in turn enriching classroom dialogue. Using different modes of dialogue, students formulate problems, identify promising ideas, co-construct explanations, refine problems and revise theories progressively, establishing highlevel goals to deepen inquiry for theory revision. KB meta-talks and KF assessment/analytics tools are used to scaffold students to reflect on their continuing dialogue (Zhang, Scardamalia, Lamon, Messina, & Reeve, 2007). KB dialogic pedagogy is principle-based – teachers focus on a set of principles (Scardamalia, 2002; see Table 32.1), rather than on a prescribed sequence of tasks, as is common in cooperative/collaborative design (Slavin, 2011). This does not mean that classroom tasks and activities do not exist; rather, the teacher focuses on how principles are enacted, varying the tasks to suit the emerging lesson goals and students’ epistemic needs. Paralleling the emphasis on collective agency, idea improvement, rise-above and reflective assessment (Section 3), several pedagogical principles are discussed. Collective agency and KB culture for dialogue. KB includes both online and classroom dialogue. To engage students in exploratory talk, a KB classroom culture of collective agency needs to be developed. Within a broadly defined curriculum area, students post their ideas/questions openly (e.g., on the KB wall or posters), and they actively generate problems and pursue dialogic inquiry on KF as a community. Following some initial KF/classroom work, a KB talk takes place that usually involves the class sitting in a circle with the teacher, who participates as a group member – listening, building onto ideas, questioning, explaining, modelling and sustaining dialogue. Typically, a student introduces a problem/dilemma, then “hands it off ” to another class member who has indicated an interest in “building-on,” and this student-led dialogue continues. These dialogues help students to express what they see as important questions and identify gaps for further dialogue within their community; following the KB talk, they write more on KF, based on their dialogue. The teacher’s role is to demonstrate how s/he also engages in exploratory talk – s/he will ask questions, provide explanations, grapple with the ideas and help to identify the students’ epistemic needs (e.g., what are we wondering as a community?). Primarily, the dialogue proceeds with collective agency, and the teacher acts as a co-investigator alongside the students, as a knowledge-building community member. Idea improvement and idea-centred dialogue. Dialogic approaches emphasize the interaction of diverse perspectives for the emergence of new ideas (Wegerif, 2011). KB dialogue is idea-driven and dialogic pedagogy includes intentional elements to help students develop an explicit awareness of idea development beyond task completion (Hewitt, 2002). For example, Caswell and Bielaczyc (2002) discussed directly with young students that “ideas” are pretty neat things they can work with, using strategies such as the “idea-ball” metaphor. Students see KF as a place where they can put their ideas for everyone to help improve these ideas collectively. Regularly, students’ KF writing and dialogue is projected on screens and students discuss, during KB talk, how their initial ideas have developed, how they have found some “promising ideas” that need building on and attention, and how they will revise some ideas further. 479

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Rise-above and meta-dialogue. Different dialogic approaches have emphasized the deepening of dialogue (e.g., Accountable Talk, Michaels & O’Connor, 2012). KB pedagogy uses rise-above and meta-dialogue, supported with technology, to deepen and to synthesize for emergent and sustained dialogue. After students have written on KF for some time, there may be various fragmentary ideas; they can use e-portfolios to reflect, track and synthesize the best work of the community, using reference Notes (van Aalst & Chan, 2007; Lei & Chan, 2018). In classroom KB talks with a meta-dialogue focus, students can engage in dialogue about dialogue; specifically, they can discuss what they have accomplished in pursuing the problem on KF (e.g., “Putting our ideas together,” “We now know … ”); identify new questions and emergent goals (e.g., “We still could not understand why … ”); design new questions (e.g., “Maybe we can look at this problem in a different way”) or just reflect on KF progress (e.g., “Is our discussion going anywhere?”).These discourse moves bear some similarities to the modified Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (SEDA) including “coordination” and “reflection on dialogue” (Hennessy et al., 2016; Howe, Hennessy, Mercer,Vrikki, & Wheatley, 2019), that merit further investigation. Learning-analytics-supported dialogue. Reflection is important for deepening dialogue. As discussed previously, “reflection on dialogue” has been examined in some dialogic coding schemes (Hennessy et al., 2016). With emergent technology, KB dialogic pedagogy involves the use of assessment and learning analytics (see Section 3) to prompt students’ classroom talk about their ongoing KB work. Teachers can work with students to examine what they have done on KF. Using analytics-supported talk, teachers can draw students into deeper dialogues to help them make sense of their work. Concurrent feedback from learning analytics may help widen the dialogic space and provide opportunities for transformative dialogue. Yang et al. (2016) used KF’s Knowledge Connections Analyser to demonstrate how analytic results prompted student classroom and group dialogue on new ideas and questions, supporting students’ metacognition, reflection and progress for future work.

Future research for dialogic approaches and knowledge building Examining digitally mediated dialogue from a CSCL KB perspective raises new questions meriting further inquiry. First, as new technologies emerge, dialogue takes different forms, and the integration of online and classroom dialogue becomes an increasingly important area of inquiry. KB examines both KF online and KB classroom dialogue that can provide good opportunities for developing multi-modal and temporal analysis of dialogue, and these methods may be applicable for different dialogic approaches. KB research is developing new assessment and learning analytics technology (Chen & Zhang, 2016; see Section 3) and including the Knowledge Building Discourse Explorer (KBDeX) (Oshima et al., 2012), a social network analysis tool that can be applied to online and offline dialogue simultaneously to demonstrate how ideas develop over time. The turn-by-turn analyses from KBDeX can help reveal temporal dimensions, identifying critical moments of change in dialogue. Ongoing research is taking place using this tool to investigate online and classroom dialogue, tracking possible pivotal points of knowledge building over time (Chan, Hennessy, Tong, van Aalst, & Wegerif, 2019). There are other learning analytics approaches and tools (e.g., epistemic network analysis, Shaffer, 2018) that also track the temporal dimensions of dialogue using dynamic network models. The rapid development of learning analytics has important implications for developing new approaches to the analysis of educational dialogue integrating different modes, and further research is needed. A second area is continuing the inquiry into the characterization of classroom dialogue (Howe & Abedin, 2013) and incorporating new forms of dialogue moves emerging from the wider use of technology. Knowledge building/creation, as a CSCL approach, has focused on 480

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coding schemes for online dialogue, rather than for classroom dialogue moves. Using the insights from dialogic research, research in KB could consider more systematic ways of analysing KB classroom dialogue. On the other hand, current coding schemes, while capturing some important dialogic moves (e.g., reasoning, deepening) have not adequately considered KB aspects of coordination, rise-above and collective reflection (see discussion previously on meta-dialogue and related dialogue moves, Hennessy et al., 2016), and further research would be fruitful. While there may be few instances of these more complex moves in regular classrooms (Howe et al., 2019), the incorporation of these dialogue moves has research implications for new coding schemes and pedagogy. As well, researchers have analysed dialogue using different units of analysis, including individual utterances and moves (Hennessy et al., 2016), classroom episodes (Mortimer & Scott, 2003) and those involving episodes, sequences and moves (Wells & Arauz, 2006), many focusing on teacher facilitation. It would also be fruitful to explore coding systems focusing on idea development and rise-above processes, linking across different levels, initiated by both teachers and students at both classroom and group levels. Third, there are design implications for dialogic pedagogy for the teaching of ground rules and principles. Seminal research in dialogic education has demonstrated the role of ground rules in helping students to think together and promoting exploratory talk (Dawes, Mercer & Wegerif, 2004). As technology changes, new ground rules and norms may emerge for different dialogic goals and processes (see Rasmussen, Amundrud & Ludvigsen, Chapter 28, this volume). KB consists of a set of principles that reflect the dialogic intentions of scientific and collective creativity. Drawing from the insights about teaching ground rules, it would be helpful to investigate how the teaching of KB principles would help students to develop an explicit understanding of what is needed in KB progressive dialogue for community advance.While ground rules for exploratory talk focus on specific principles and strategies (e.g., asking each other questions), KB principles are epistemic principles defining what KB is about (e.g., improvable ideas), and students need to interpret and reflect upon them.Technology-mediated dialogue may require new ground rules, such as maintaining joint attention (Rasmussen, Amundrud & Ludvigsen, Chapter 28, this volume) and KB dialogue focusing on collective principles (e.g., rise-above). Examining different ground rules/ principles with emerging technology and student understanding of what they mean can help reveal students’ epistemology of dialogue as a fruitful area of investigation.

Summary and conclusions Developing dialogic thinking for collective creativity and innovation is a major education goal in the knowledge era. Dialogue is pivotal in the KB model, which aims to bring the goals and processes of scientific discourse in knowledge communities into education. KB theory highlights collective responsibility and how students engage in progressive dialogue while working with diverse ideas and different models for knowledge emergence. In KB, dialogue generates more dialogue and knowledge begets knowledge, similar to the dialogic practices of scientific communities. As with many other dialogic approaches, these new forms of dialogue can be made possible through technology. KF affordances, by linking principles to pedagogy, provide a strong example of how technology can open, widen and sustain dialogic and reflective spaces for progressive dialogue. KB dialogic pedagogy highlights several principles, including collective epistemic agency, idea improvement, meta-dialogue and analytics-supported reflection, to support exploratory talk for KB. Online and classroom dialogue are intertwined to facilitate progressive dialogue oriented towards creative work in scientific communities. There may be synergistic advancements examining dialogic education from the knowledgebuilding perspectives. Dialogic thinking is pivotal in the knowledge age, and KB may help to 481

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conceptualize new forms of dialogue emphasizing creative knowledge work. KB theory can be enhanced by using a dialogic lens to focus on diverse models to spark progress and multi-modal/ temporal analysis to examine the trajectory of KB dialogue. The application of assessment and analytics tools in KB can, in turn, enrich the analysis of technology-mediated dialogues. KB classroom dialogue may be illuminated through developing analytic systems similar to those used in dialogic teaching; reciprocally, the emphasis on synthesis, rise-above and meta-talk may enrich coding systems and research on classroom dialogue. Theoretical, methodological and design implications for dialogic theory and KB model would be enriched through continuing dialogue on these related research traditions.

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33 DEMOCRATIZATION AND EDUCATION Conditions and technology for dialogic transformative political education Benzi Slakmon and Baruch B. Schwarz

Like education, democracy is a normative project in a constant state of refinement, or crisis, depending on the observer’s point of view. Current objections focus on the following problems (Papacharissi & Papacharissi, 2010; Hess & McAvoy, 2014; Wells, 2015; Fishkin & Mansbridge, 2017, Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018): 1. Growing lack of trust towards elites, democratic institutions and processes, resulting in the polarized effects of decline of participation in traditional, recognized, democratic practices (voting, membership in political parties, petitions, advocating for social causes, community volunteering and newspapers reading) on the one hand and in the rise of populism on the other. 2. Inability of existing institutions to meet people’s demands, and more specifically, inadequacy of the model of “representatives” in mass, consumption societies. 3. Narrowing of the pluralism of thought. Physically, heterogeneity declines, as the growing economical gaps are leading to less diverse modes of living and as a result, to more “likeminded classrooms” (Hess & McAvoy, 2014). Communicatively, pluralism is hindered by the effects of polls and the informational echo chamber of social networks (Sunstein, 2018), which both contribute to confirmation bias (Sharot & Garret, 2016). Government-wise, representatives’ pluralism of thought is hindered by the growing tendency to enforce coalition discipline.

Three fundamental democratic questions 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. These systems are aimed at strengthening the elites and at restraining the people’s power to govern (Schumpeter, 1942; Hamilton et al., 2003/1787). The second impetus drives democratization. The process of democratization challenges communities, societies and nations at various levels. While some associations are in transition towards democracy and deal with questions of why and how to 485

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become democratic, more established democratic associations are struggling to find ways to consolidate democracy, make it sustainable and deepen it. At any level of association, from small classroom groups to national parliaments, and in all sorts of democratic arrangements, from direct and participatory democratic forms to representational ones, three perennial questions stand out as fundamental: the first question is the question of representation: who are the people? What are the boundaries of the ruling group? Who is included in it and who is excluded from it, yet remains governed by it? The second question emerges from the first; it is the question of participation in power. Who has the legitimacy to participate in the deliberative, decision-making and governing practices? The answer is not identical to the first, more formal one. The question of participation also involves the question of the legitimate participatory practices. The process of democratization often deals with expanding the boundaries of the legitimate participants, of the governing social body. The third question deals with the notion of governance: what does it mean to govern? What are the borders of the governed spaces and what are the current governing practices?

Democracy (also) as association, not (only) state–citizen relationships Democracy is an evolving process, deeply rooted in societies’ socio-cultural conditions, 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 in the last few centuries. It is, however, a historical, contingent manifestation of the old question of how to live together: democracies have long and specific trajectories of evolvement; this evolvement is not always in parallel with the development of the nation-state. More primitive forms of democracy, also known as democracy’s first wave (Papacharissi & Papacharissi, 2010) have evolved among groups as they tried to build inclusive, participatory, self-governing systems. Local forms of associations have emerged throughout history at different times and in cultures – the Greek polis, the Vikings’ thing and the “primitive democracy” of Mesopotamia (Isakhan, 2011), to name a few. These ancient forms of democracy should not interest only historians: local forms of deliberative associations keep appearing and enriching deliberative democracy’s body of knowledge (Curato, Dryzek, Ercan, Hendriks, & Niemeyer, 2017). The importance of small associations and the creativity to form new participatory and governing practices, and before that, new democratic venues, is paramount, especially for those dealing with deliberative and direct forms of 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 selfgovernance. And although democracy is a collective endeavor, the essentials of democracy are not related to the size of the association but to its communicative patterns and its underlying dispositions, referred to by Robert Dahl (2008) as the “logic of equivalence”. Such logic consists of three parts: identified identity of a group; social imagination of the members of the group as equal in terms of their status and skills; and internal governance with limited external intervention. The inherent link between democracy and representational modes of participation often leads democratic education to socialize and acculturate in the realm of parliamentary democracy, both in terms of values and in terms of practices. Such education is not only contingent but also misses more fundamental aspects of the democratic educational process, namely democratic discursive capacities, the emergence of associations and the enactment of collective actions. Realizing that the essentials of democracy are related to its communicative patterns and its underlying dispositions is particularly important from an educational/developmental perspective. We will return to this idea later to argue that 486

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democratic education should resemble this historical process through the design of learning environments in which students can operate democratization processes at an ever-increasing level of complexity, beginning with the primordial states of transition from pre-democratic local arrangements to basic, and later more complex, democratic associations (Slakmon, 2018; Slakmon & Schwarz, 2017). The interdependency between democracy and education, a reappearing theme in pragmatic and liberal theories (Dewey, 1916; Gutmann, 1987; Gutmann & Thompson, 2009) dates to the beginnings of the Athenian democracy. In his famous funeral oration, Pericles praises Athenians as lovers of the beautiful in our tastes and our strength lies, in our opinion, not in deliberation and discussion, but that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act, and of acting, too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection. (Thucidydes, 1996) This early definition of collaborative “knowledge building” focuses on the need to provide citizens, coming from different backgrounds and occupations, the skills to engage deeply in high-stakes issues of which they may have no prior education. This is true for both citizens, judges, governors and soldiers. Thoughtful collective action can only be a result of collaborative discussions. The opposite is also true: actions are the basis for further reflection. Conversely, lack of adequate dialogic skill ends up not only in poor participation rates but also in low-quality decision-making processes. Learning together is a fundamental democratic capacity; poor performances in dialogue are, simply put, hazardous for democracies. Of all kinds of inequalities hindering the democratic project, inequality of communicative capacities could be the most important one to tackle. Citizens lacking dialogic education are less likely to be able to elaborate their own ideas, as well as to build theirs on others. They suffer from having less opportunities to voice themselves in a deteriorating slope of marginalization. Learning discussions are not only instruments for democratization; the transition from teaching with discussions to teaching for discussions (Parker & Hess, 2001) positions deliberative learning dialogue as crucial civic occasions. As such they ought to be at the locus of the democratic process. In the next paragraph, we will see that, in spite of the crucial importance of learning discussions for democratization, researchers in civic education do not focus on them. Their focus on “ideal types” is, however, relevant to learning discussions.

Democratic education: Main approaches and distinctions Theorists of civic education use the Weberian idea of “ideal type” (Banks, 1998; Sears & Hughes, 1996; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004) as a basis for theoretical-philosophical debate, in order to discern the ideal types of civic education. The types stand as analytical devices to assist teachers, practitioners, scholars and researchers in understanding the complex process of civic education. Cohen (2016) distinguishes between the following four ideal types of civic education: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Liberal Civic Education Diversity Civic Education Critical Civic Education Republican Civic Education

The first ideal type is Liberal Civic Education, according to which students develop individualistic skills needed in order to take part in the political process (Nie, Junn & Stehlik-Barry, 1996): 487

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“Liberation of the individuals so that realization of their capacities may be the law of their life” (Dewey, 1963, p. 56). From this perspective, the individual is seen as an autonomous being, with values, personal behavior, independence and responsibility that are aimed at enhancing the individual’s personal situation within a pre-given social, political and economic situation. The second ideal type is Diversity Civic Education which conveys the ways in which the different social groups that compose society may receive recognition and take part in the national political spheres (Levinson, 2012). The main goal here is to raise awareness of the plural, multivoiced social reality and, in particular, of the oppression of marginalized social groups by more hegemonic societal voices (Adams & Bell, 2016; Banks, 2004). The third ideal type is Critical Civic Education that demands from the student to develop individual (and not communal, as in Diversity Civic Education) analytical skills needed in order to better understand (rather than to raise awareness of) the unjust reality of society. This conception of this type of civic education is rooted in the assumption that the world may be portrayed as a battleground between social forces, where the dominant hegemonic powers work in both exposed and hidden ways in order to oppress the weaker players. Thus, the supporters of this point of view criticize the idea of generalization and objective knowledge and call to emphasize the historical and social context of knowledge and of social issues (McLaren & Kincheloe, 2007).The role of education is seen as a means of promoting social justice and democracy by empowering the students and cultivating their intellect.The fourth ideal type is Republican Civic Education, also known as the assimilationist notion of citizenship (Banks, 2004). It is through this type of education that students should possess a feeling of belonging and solidarity to the national entity. This conception of civic education will emphasize the ways in which to arouse feelings of membership and affiliation to the larger community, thus relating to the substantive elements of society. From the outset, it is evident that education for deliberative democracy is currently not part of the educational landscape. Moreover, these four ideal types are not specific in terms of how education can promote each of the types envisioned. Of course, Liberal Civic Education and Diversity Civic Education put emphasis on the process of the transmission of knowledge as opposed to Critical Civic Education and Republican Civic Education that emphasize the instilling of values and principles. Whereas it is enough in the framework of Liberal Civic Education and Critical Civic Education to develop individual skills, Diversity Civic Education and Republican Civic Education strive to promote a feeling of belonging. Yet, these four types do not prescribe particular practices to be enacted in classrooms, and as a result, the connection between political theory and pedagogical practices remains vague. For example, political discussions may be enacted according to any of the models, but the ways the practices are enacted are largely undetermined. 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 (Michaels, O’Connor & Resnick, 2008; Mayer, 2012; Slakmon & Schwarz, 2017) This indetermination is particularly salient in the pioneering works of Dianna Hess on seminar – interpretive discussions – and deliberations or, as referred to in her later works, political discussions, that is, discussions about issues on which action is needed (Parker & Hess, 2001; Hess, 2009; Hess & Gatti, 2010). Hess and McAvoy (2014) present noble forms in which political discussions in civic education in classrooms in the United States are played out. The authors stress that these political discussions are “best practices”, characterized as discussions in which the engagement of the students is not conditioned by a massive control of the teacher. Teachers do not recite their lessons according to a predetermined plan, but give students the freedom to express their own opinions on political issues. To a large extent, the authors are neutral

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with regard to the procedural/substantial political knowledge or the individualistic/communal norms and values that characterize the previously described idea types. Hess and McAvoy’s book is important because it brings to the fore the practice of political discussions as a main practice in civic education and views it, just like Pericles, also as the realization of the democratic process. However, Hess and McAvoy include three important caveats: first, political discussions are quite rare, at least at the beginning of the third millennium in the United States. Second, teachers who bring political issues into their classrooms often control discussions by asking questions and providing answers. Their lessons look often like “shows” in which students attend (and enjoy) their teacher’s performance. Third, the characterization of the “best practices” observed by Hess and McAvoy is missing in their book: do students simply present their political views, or are they critical of their peers? Do they give up part of their own identity to participate in a discussion in which all voices must be heard? In her important 2004 book, Argumenter en Démocratie [Arguing in Democracy], Emmanuelle Danblon provides a historical-philosophical answer to the previous questions by showing that a particular form of talk in the public sphere plays a crucial role in the establishment of democracies. Argumentation, in which rhetorical moves are operated to convince a reasonable audience (a universal audience as worded by her philosopher father, Chaim Perelman), realizes the gist of democracy. In an interesting historical analysis, Danblon shows how argumentation in the public sphere has carved Athenian democracy and how it characterizes the promotion of democracy in the modern world. Danblon reveals numerous argumentative and rhetorical flaws in our times on contested, controversial issues. However, she asserts that this form of talk as an ideal form is crucial for the development of democracy. In addition to this historical answer, another research trend, the domain of classroom talk, partly tackles the previous questions. Researchers interested in classroom talk have identified high-quality forms from a learning point of view (see review in: Resnick, Asterhan & Clarke, 2015). Argumentative forms have been shown as particularly productive (Asterhan & Schwarz, 2016; Kuhn, Hemberger & Khait, 2014). The meaning of productivity, which was first confined to ideational outcomes, was recently enlarged to societal benefits, and deliberative argumentation was hypothesized to lead to deliberative democracy (Schwarz & Baker, 2016). This way, dialogue could be considered as an end in itself, with humanistic and civic democratic goals (Burbules, 1993; Wegerif, 2007). For example, Alexander’s approach to dialogic teaching (2004) acknowledges the close ties between prevailing cultural discourse and the dominant classroom discourse and yet presents ways in which the classroom, as a place of monologue, could be redefined through dialogic talk. In this sense, Dialogic Teaching is a transformative political project, as it challenges imposed classroom political conditions we outlined earlier: the governing body, the structure of participation and the governing practices. As such, Dialogic Teaching is relevant to out-of-school talk and to civic education.Within classrooms, students who take part in Dialogic Teaching have “voices”, in the sense that they have opportunities to speak, they express their own ideas, speaking on their own terms, and they are being heeded (Alexander, 2018; Segal, Pollak & Lefstein, 2017; Segal & Lefstein, 2016). However, often, students may enthusiastically contribute to lively classroom discussions, often frame these discussions as dialogical responses that build on each other’s ideas, but at the level of voice, the discussion may remain mostly univocal, since most student contributions are aligned with the official voice of the curriculum (Segal & Leftein, 2016). This dilemma resolves itself into teaching that may be dialogic in form but monologic in function. It is through pedagogy that a paper curriculum gains life and meaning, and in this matter the agency of teachers and students is critical. Schwarz and Baker (2017) are aware of the dichotomy between the form and function of dialogues.In particular, while they recognize Dialogic Teaching to be relevant to civic education, they note that this pedagogy 489

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proposes numerous forms (that are designated as repertoires), but these forms are not specific enough to suggest ways to engage in discussions in classrooms. Teachers are invited to use rich repertoires, but still Dialogic Teaching does not convey clear messages for societal change (Schwarz & Baker, 2016).

New forms of civic education embedded in classroom dialogue In recent years, the notion of participation has replaced former interest of political theorists in the notion of resistance (Jenkins, Ford & Green, 2013), partly because of the growing understanding of the intimate relation between technological modes of communication and citizenship. Seeing democracy as a set of values, in constant incursion into new spheres, has led to an extensive exploration of the notions of digital citizenship and participatory culture (Dahlberg, 2001; 2011; Wells, 2015; Romme, Broekgaarden, Huijzer, Reijmer, & van der Eyden, 2018; Batorski & Grzywinska, 2018). Different cultures – public spheres and communicative means – result in different (levels and) practices of participation, hence in new kinds of democratic actions. Yet technologies, including interactive ICT, do not necessarily entail realization of the equality needed for democracies, even in technological environments with strong affordances for participation. Teachers, moderators and designers must consider ways to implement the surrounding culture of equality. Instead of dealing directly with traditional political practices such as voting, petitions and representation, dialogic participation in technological learning discussions involves a set of participatory practices that can later be drawn upon in more complex democratic contexts (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, & Robison, 2009; Rheingold, 2012; Jenkins, Ito & Boyd, 2016): •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• •• ••

Setting the agenda, reaching a shared purpose Defining the norms – setting ground rules for deliberation Watching and listening Reflecting Coordinating contributions of oneself and other contributions Encouraging participation, reducing barriers of entry Supporting voicing, connecting discussants and ideas, dealing with authoritative voices Inventing and regulating inquiry processes Taking part in decision making, reaching Habermasian “rational consensus”, while “Representing difference” (Kapoor, 2002; Hillier, 2003) by facing and dealing with agonism (Mouffe, 2000) and/or aporia (Burbules, 2000) Shared cultural production: producing end products such as artefacts, conclusions, manifests Circulating the products in broader, influential public spheres

Yet it is important to be cautious by not simply identifying deliberative practices with democratization or, in other words, addressing the contradiction between democratization and socialization. Predetermined ground rules for Exploratory talk, like the ones initiated in the works of Mercer and colleagues (Mercer, Wegerif & Dawes, 1999), or teacher-led apprenticeship into the realm of Accountable talk (Michaels, O’Connor & Resnick, 2008), in our experience at least, though warmly welcomed by practitioners and hailed for their practicality, lack a fundamental constituting phase in which students imagine their own community vision by themselves. Alignment with progressive forms of talk, associated with the vision of deliberative democracy, falls short in addressing the classroom as a political democratic body, defined by its ability to

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self-govern its modes of democratization processes. Education for democracy cannot be based on the latter because democratic education deals with nurturing the unique voice every citizen has and its introduction in the public sphere of the dialogue. The students are not only future citizens. They are future governors for whom current affairs are conditions but not imperatives. Faith in democracies lies in the assumption that full participation may lead to societal changes, and as we saw, the current democratic crisis represents a moment in which a great deal of the new participatory modes are not being translated into collective power of the acting agents. In order to ensure political equality, all of the following criteria must be met (Dahl, 2008). Elaborating on them also provides evidence on the intimate relation between dialogue and democratic education: 1. Effective participation – participants in the democratic process/dialogue must have equal opportunities to express themselves, ideas and concerns. The (power) relations between possessing the floor in dialogue/the public sphere and the possibility of persuading and being recognized is clear; therefore, dialogic education must not settle for more equal structures of participation; it must move beyond providing freedom of (even equal) expression. From a dialogic perspective, the freedom of expression includes ensuring the listening conditions of the other participants. 2. Equality in voting – equality entails ensuring that all participants have the same access to decision-making mechanisms. In addition, higher-level democratic dialogue would require that through discussion students build their own framework for reaching conclusions and decisions. 3. Equal access to prior knowledge needed for reasoned understanding of the issue – the need to provide each member of the association equal and effective opportunities to study the consequences of the decision the group is about to reach, as well as to consider alternative policies. Dialogue-wise, providing equal learning opportunities throughout the process means providing the setting for equal pre-discussion learning, ensuring plural multi-voiced deliberation during the dialogue and orchestrating the later phases of agreements or aporia as open and not fully decisive. In this sense, dialogic truth resembles Popper’s notion of “scientific truth” as not yet refuted but hypothesized (Popper, 2014). 4. Control over the agenda – similar to the Bakhtinian dialogic model (1981) or the one implemented in Philosophy for Children settings (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 2010), democratic deliberation is infinite. The fundamental question of who governs and the methods of participation and governing are always open. The freedom to design local processes – defining the body (sovereign, participants), agreeing on legitimate and expected practices of participation, setting the agenda by joint clarification of the issues discussed and designing the suitable method for pursuing it – is of major importance. Its implementation is the touchstone that distinguishes between socialization into existing democratic practices and subjectification, in which people realize their citizenship through dialogue (Biesta, 2015; Slakmon & Schwarz, 2017). Becoming critical towards pseudo-democratic processes, which are semi-participatory but bear no meaning in terms of power distribution and decisions made (elsewhere), is of major importance in times when encouragement to participate in the public sphere often hides the real spheres in which decisions are made. Expropriation of power from democratic sovereigns in the name of states of emergency or non-democratic agents (international conglomerates, lobbying, closed areas for security reasons) characterizes current democratic affairs and should be dealt with in the dialogic sphere of the associations.

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A new approach is needed then, which goes beyond Republican Civic Education – beyond the instilling of values and the feeling of belonging – to democratically envision the desired notion of “good” for the association and work collaboratively towards building and refining it gradually and steadily through recursive acts of collective reflection. The need for argumentative forms and dialogue must be realized by the association. Therefore, the design has to ensure its emergence as a natural consequence of the associations’ needs and stages of development. The association will use argumentative forms in their owned public sphere, where practices, emotions, opinions and values are contested, not as an external imposition but as a made-up solution. A new kind of talk is needed. In terms of design, it includes transition from preliminary pre-democratic phases of association to place-making of the public sphere. In terms of speech genres and talk functionalities, inclusiveness implies initial embracement of all modes of talk and collaborative movement towards sophisticated forms of argumentation and dialogue. This sort of bottom-up formation of the “Polis” is distinguished from the four existing ideal types in several ways, most notably in the degrees of freedom given to the association to envision its unique topoi, in the emphasis on past (discursive) events as a way to reflect, monitor and refine the realization of the topoi and in the discursive ethos of the associations, built on expecting authentic full engagement of the participants, therefore resulting in seeing emotive expressions and emotional work as important as its dialogic and argumentative tenets. We have called this talk Deliberative emotional talk (Slakmon & Schwarz, forthcoming). In the rest of this chapter, we succinctly show the promising role that CSCL technologies could play in the emergence of these talk practices.

Fostering democratization with CSCL There are many reasons for which technologies turn out to be indispensable for enabling deliberative modes of talk. Firstly, as already mentioned, against the decline in traditional civic activity and engagement among young adults, digital realms are playing an increasing role in their lives. Virtual spaces are perceived by the younger generation as living spaces in which people dwell (Ito et al., 2009; Boyd, 2014). New media technologies are acknowledged as manifestations of the public sphere with important political function and significance (Dahlberg, 2011; Fishkin, 2018, p. 171; Wegerif, 2017). From social network sites to designated environments for political education (Slakmon & Schwarz, 2017), many of our engagements in public discussions are digitally mediated. Internet-based platforms for online deliberation and collaborative knowledge integration are on the rise (Hogan, Hall & Harney, 2017; Davies & Chandler, 2012; Towne & Herbsleb, 2012; Price, 2009). As much as education should be built on real-life settings, the digital environment should be seen as an integral part of the democratic curriculum. As a result of the transition of public debate into digital spheres, we are witnessing new forms of contamination of deliberative processes.This neo-relativist approach demands countereducation for proficient digital citizenship. The entire fields of critical thinking and knowledge integration are in a transition because of the need for adaptation to a new media environment: critical media literacies and lateral rather than deep horizontal reading, for example (Wineburg & McGrew, 2017). CSCL tools for scaffolding collaborative reasoning and converging may play a crucial role in supporting these efforts and also in providing more safe, clean and organized public spheres. The knowledge the CSCL community holds has become highly crucial and beneficial for the public sphere. A third reason for the relevance of technologies to democratization is that technology affords the presentation of the citizens through “stories” they call tell (especially in social networks). Texts, photos or videos find a conduit for storytelling in these networks (Lundby, 2008; Street, 492

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2014). Such a capacity gives people a distinctive voice, which is so important in democratization processes. However, social networks, simply put, were not built to support learning and better deliberation over time. In this sense, “doing democracy” in the public sphere, in which progress is not achievable, is problematic. CSCL can fill the void of contemporary democratic education. On the one hand, it is consistent with the background of our social network sites (SNS) culture since it allows voicing and the reduction of barriers for entry (see review in Asterhan, 2015; Stahl, 2015; Wise & Schwarz, 2017). In addition, CSCL tools gradually developed areas of expertise in developing and supporting dialogue. Through the use of affordances (Jeong & Hmelo-Silver, 2016), macro and micro levels of constraints (Dillenbourg & Hng, 2008; Tchounikine, 2016), tools for raising the awareness of participants to various aspects of learning (Buder & Bodemer, 2008), scaffolding planning and inquiry processes (Schwarz, De Groot, Mavrikis, & Dragon, 2015) and reflective learning performance analysis, including talk (Firer & Slakmon, 2018), CSCL tools have the potential to support the collective processes that are part of the democratization process. A final reason for the relevance of technologies to democratization is that they can bring strong emotions into the public sphere. Of course, SNSs bring phenomena such as cyberbullying or shaming. But, here also, CSCL tools can help regulate strong emotions. These technologies can help avoid a purist rationalistic point of view, like the one which dominated the first generation of the theory of deliberative democracy. This first generation ignored emotive expressions and other speech genres that were not argumentative; storytelling for example, was perceived as superfluous. In fact, this disregard for emotions has been common in education. Much of the literature on emotions deals with incidental emotions, defined as “emotions not semantically linked to the reasoning stimuli” (Blanchette & Nougarou, 2017, p. 98). The expression of emotions is even considered as dangerous as it may lead to uncontrolled outbursts of what seems intolerable or threatening (Hess & McAvoy, 2014; Gindi & Ron Erlich, 2018). New approaches to deliberative democracy embrace emotions and other speech genres as integral parts of legitimate resources people capitalize on as part of their deliberation (Loewenstein, O’Donoughue & Bhatia, 2015). The introduction of the “emotional interaction” (Curato et al., 2017) is part of the norms for deliberation (Mansbridge, Hartz-Karp, Amengual, & Gastil, 2006) for those who champion deliberative democracy. Our vision for education boosting deliberative democracy is that planned, allocated, content-related intense emotional engagement should accompany deliberative settings. Such integration is important for the sake of broad citizenship education and therefore should be introduced and worked out not solely in the discipline of civics. This vision fits research advances in neuroscience and communication, according to which emotional synchronization between interlocutors precedes and conditions shared understanding (Hasson, 2010; Nummenmaa et al., 2012), and in argumentation theory, according to which emotions are gradually perceived as an integral part of argumentation (Plantin, 2004; 2011). Here also, this new trend makes CSCL tools indispensable for emotional design (Slakmon & Schwarz, forthcoming; Polo, Lund, Plantin, & Niccolai, 2016). Length limitations do not allow us to show new CSCL: tools and designs that enable reflecting on emotions identified in previous deliberations and learning to regulate them as an essential ingredient in the democratic game (Firer & Slakmon, 2018).

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34 PEDAGOGICAL LINK-MAKING WITH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN SCIENCE CLASSROOMS New perspectives on connected learning Judith Kleine Staarman and Jaume Ametller

Introduction Digital technology has changed society, and digital tools are rapidly appearing in classrooms all around the world. Digital networked technologies in particular, have changed the way in which people learn and what it means to ‘be a learner’ (Erstad, 2014), and we thus need to expand our understanding of teaching and learning processes in the classroom to include the use of digital, multimodal media, both inside and outside the classroom. Often, learning experiences are visualised as being ‘trajectories of learning’ in which one experience is chain-linked to other experiences. In education, it is usually the teacher who facilitates the connections between these experiences, since one of the main roles of the teacher is to develop links between learning experiences (see for example Mercer, Dawes & Kleine Staarman, 2009; Scott, Mortimer & Ametller, 2011; Alexander, 2017). However, utilising networked technology in classrooms gives students the opportunity to draw in their own interests and experiences in their learning trajectories in ways that were not possible before. In this sense, the boundaries of the classroom walls have become permeable, and the classroom has changed from being a stand-alone, separate space of learning and teaching, to a node, or ‘intersection’ (Leander, Phillips & Taylor, 2010, p. 336) within a more personalised open-ended and non-linear learning experience, in which teachers help students to create new understanding, by weaving together different elements and new multimodal information, using networked technology. In this new scenario teachers need to put more emphasis on how these links are built in order to create new understanding rather than on providing specific instances of such links. A key concern in our current connected world is therefore to develop our understanding of how knowledge and learning develop in, and move between, various contexts. This requires a reconsideration of the way in which we define ‘teaching’ as an activity and the development of our understanding of learning processes of students across spaces and time.Two important questions in this respect are ‘How do students connect one learning experience with another?’, and ‘If learning is seen as weaving together different experiences and information, how are opportunities for learning organised and supported in these trajectories of learning and experience?’. 497

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These questions are not only relevant for researchers in education, in order to help to explain what is going on in classrooms, but also for teachers, to help them design valuable learning experiences for their students. To understand and reconceptualise the role of the teacher in creating links between learning experiences of students, and to enable us to explain the ways in which networked technologies permeate into the teaching experiences of teachers, we need to challenge and refine theories of teaching and learning and develop new ways of theorising classroom practice. For the purpose of this paper, we draw on a dialogic perspective of learning, seeing dialogue as more than the exchange of recognisable utterances but as a ‘theoretical idea that defines the nature of many aspects of the relationality of language’ (Barwell, 2016, p. 336). In particular, we explore how the use of new digital technology reshapes dialogic practices in education. We augment a dialogic perspective of learning with the concept of ‘pedagogical links’, introduced by Scott and colleagues (2011) to account for the different ways in which teachers connect different learning experiences, elements of classroom activity and different pieces of information and conceptual constructs during their teaching practice, in order to help students attain a better understanding of science. Thus, this paper explores how this notion of pedagogical links is articulated when interactive technologies are used to support the dialogue and the collaborative construction of knowledge in science classrooms. In this case, it is important to note that we refer not only to the pedagogical links that are created directly with and through technology but also those that take place because technology is being invoked in the activity. We will provide some examples of classroom practices from our own research in science classrooms, to show how our interpretative framework can be used to shed light on the ways in which new interactive technologies have helped to make the classroom walls permeable, and the role of the teacher in helping students to weave together new information and ideas into shared understandings. We draw on our own research, undertaken in two different countries with two different educational cultures. Of course, we can see clear differences in pedagogy and teaching practices across these different countries, for instance in discursive practices in the classroom (see also Alexander, 2000). It is important to note that, despite international trends, different cultures and even regional and local differences affect the use of technology in classrooms. However, in our research, we have found it useful to analyse (though not necessarily compare) classroom practices in two different countries, and the fact that we see very similar discursive and pedagogic practices around new technology strengthens our interpretative framework for understanding the role of networked technologies in dialogic practices in schools.

Dialogic space Dialogic and dialogue are terms that different people have attached different meanings to, and over the years, these concepts have been approached in various ways. Bakhtin (1981) argued that dialogue is the interplay of voices in the way that every utterance or thought is a response to utterances and thoughts of others. In this sense, the voices of others resonate in our dialogues and conscience, and education involves participants to engage with each other’s perspectives in classroom dialogues. In contrast to a view of education that sees learning as internalising the knowledge of others, Freire (1986) argued that students and teachers should engage in a joint dialogue about the object of study. In this sense, dialogue in classrooms can be seen as a way of empowering students, by enabling them to bring in their own knowledge and understandings into the dialogue. In the UK, the concept of ‘Dialogic Teaching’ was developed by Alexander (2017) and others (see for example Mercer et al., 2009) as a pedagogic approach with an emphasis on the active, significant and sustained participation of students in classroom dialogue. 498

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In Dialogic Teaching classrooms, tasks are collaborative, involving teachers and students working together and listening to one another, and students are encouraged to voice their ideas without having to worry about giving incorrect answers. From a Dialogic Teaching perspective, the goal for a science educator would not just be to help students to understand the science curriculum, or even to help students to become fluent ‘speakers of science’ (Lemke, 1990), but to make students fluent, self-aware and reflective speakers of science (Mercer et al., 2009). The advent of digital networked technology in classrooms has created both opportunities and tensions for student engagement and learning, not in the least because networked technology connects students’ identities, voices and discourses with other discourses and voices (Erstad, 2014; Kumpulainen & Mikkola, 2014; Kumpulainen & Rajala, 2017). These connections help to open up and expand the learning space of the classroom, or as Wegerif (2013) puts it, it opens up the ‘Dialogic Space’ in the classroom. In discussing the meaning of ‘Dialogic Space’, Wegerif (2013) argues that dialogues may be viewed ‘from the outside’ as events that are taking place in a specific space and time. However, ‘from the inside’, dialogues have their own space and time and in themselves resonate the echoes of the voices of people who are not physically present in the event.Viewed from the outside, a dialogue can take place between two people in a particular place. When viewed from the inside, the same dialogue assumes that participants negotiate multiple positions and perspectives, echoing the voices of others, who are not physically present in the dialogue. This implies that the notion of ‘Dialogic Space’ is not a static ‘space’ but a dynamic and continuous unfolding of ‘meaning’. When viewed from inside dialogues, ‘developing meaning’ assumes that there is a tension between the multiple perspectives that exist within these dialogues.When multiple voices interact with one another, the differences between these perspectives is what Wegerif (2013, p. 4) calls a ‘dialogic gap’. Since new meaning cannot arise in an interaction between two voices that say the same thing, it is in this space between different perspectives in a dialogue where new meaning arises. It is important to note that dialogues occur between different voices, not necessarily people. While these may be the voices of actual people talking in an interaction, the dialogic space also invokes the voices of others who are not physically present in the situation or voices of abstract entities, such as cultural norms and values. Education is a specific context in which dialogues take place, and this specificity can be characterised by drawing upon the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ perspectives of dialogue. In schools, dialogue is often an interactional form, ‘performed’ by learners through language. However, a dialogic perspective emphasises the development of new meaning through openness in the dialogue, addressing one another’s ideas and building on the various meanings that arise in the dialogue. In this respect, Bakhtin (1981) emphasised the difference between an authoritative voice and a persuasive voice. The authoritative voice is one that comes into a dialogue from the outside, is rich in tradition and authority and ‘demands our unconditional allegiance’ (p. 343). It functions as a stable reality or the ‘truth’ and is not surrounded by an ‘agitated and cacophonous dialogic life’ (p. 344). One example given by Bakhtin of authoritative discourse is ‘acknowledged scientific truth’ (p. 343). In contrast, a persuasive voice enters into the realm of a dialogue and changes the dialogue from within (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 343). Internally persuasive voices are supported by the power of arguments and centralise the tension between conflicting views and different meanings. In education, especially when critical thinking and an ability to creatively develop new understandings are considered important, a dialogic perspective is particularly important, shifting the importance from actual ownership of ideas to having a dialogue with ideas, which means not only focusing on authoritative voices but also on developing children’s ability to engage with persuasive voices. A key challenge for education is to foster these dialogic processes, while at the same time maintaining a focus on curricular demands. Similarly, a challenge is to harness the potential 499

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power of technologies to help develop and sustain these dialogic processes, within the constraints of an educational environment. In our own research on dialogic teaching in science classrooms, we have found that the focus in education should not necessarily be on the technology but on the ways in which the technology is embedded within the wider dialogues of the classroom; the technology becomes an essential part of the dialogic space, opening it up, bringing in other voices and perspectives and helping to share and consolidate ideas. By following Bakhtin’s view, in addition to effective collaborative practice such as building effective collective images for problem solving (Martin & Towers, 2015), seeing a problem ‘as if through the eyes of another’ is important for emergence and development of collective group thinking and understanding.This includes, for example, recognising multiple ‘voices’ in mathematical concepts, seeing ideas from an ‘outside’ perspective, establishing dialogic space, learners’ attitudes to each other, laughter and so on. This is what Wegerif (2011) refers to as the dialogic process of conceptual growth.

Pedagogic link-making As mentioned previously, school-based learning has obvious challenges with relation to increased complexities in the classroom through the use of new digital technologies (Erstad, 2014, p. 1). Pedagogical links contribute to develop expanded notions of learning sites, in which classrooms can be seen as intersections (Leander et al., 2010) where different experiences and interests are interwoven through knowledge creation using digital media. In this respect, pedagogical links can be seen as tools to understand and foster dialogic teaching, not only in science lessons but in education more generally. Equally, pedagogic links enable the teacher to draw in a more comprehensive context in the classroom, which questions the place and time in which learning takes place. Pedagogical link-making is concerned with the ways in which teachers and students make connections between ideas in the ongoing meaning-making interactions of classroom teaching and learning.The original idea of pedagogical links (Scott et al., 2011) is based on the constructivist view that learning involves learners connecting knowledge they already have with new ideas (Larochelle, Bednarz & Garrison, 1998) and sociocultural perspectives, particularly in their conceptualising the reconstruction involved in internalisation (Vygotsky, 1987). Links are also important in dialogic perspectives of education. These connections across contexts and concepts often require the guide of an expert. Scott et al. (2011) grouped pedagogical link-making used by teachers during science lessons into three groups according to their general purpose: 1) links to promote continuity, 2) links to encourage emotional engagement and 3) links to support knowledge construction. Each of these types of pedagogical links presents specific teaching strategies.The first two types of pedagogical link-making are relevant to any classroom teaching situation, not just in science. When pedagogical link-making is used to support knowledge construction, the approach taken by the teacher depends on the nature of knowledge being linked and responds to the epistemic nature of scientific knowledge. In this case, pedagogical links are seen as ways of making explicit the connections between different elements of knowledge that need to be connected in order to construct science knowledge.

Methodology, methods and data analysis The examples presented in this paper are drawn from a number of research projects that we have been engaged in over the years, both in the UK and in Catalonia. While the projects have 500

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been slightly different in scope and context, they have in common that they are all collaborative, classroom-based studies, in which research teams have been working with teachers to jointly develop new understandings about dialogue in science classrooms (see for more information on the specific projects: Scott & Ametller, 2007; Mercer et al., 2009; Grimalt, Pintó & Ametller, 2013; Grimalt, 2016). In our projects, a range of data has been collected, including classroom video observations and interviews with teachers and students.We made video and audio recordings in more than one, often three, consecutive lessons, both of the teacher and of any group work that takes place, to be able to capture both the teaching practice and the emerging understanding of the topic. The analysis of data is mainly concerned with identifying characteristics of the interaction process, within and across a series of lessons. Our methodological framework for this can be best described as Sociocultural Discourse Analysis (Mercer, 2004; 2008), which is a methodological approach that foregrounds the historical, contextualised and purposeful nature of classroom dialogue and involves both quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis of classroom dialogue. The qualitative analyses were done using NVivo and AtlasTI and involved the development of detailed analysis maps, outlining the most important features of the lessons to capture emergent understandings and themes in the data. Quantitative analyses of transcript data are then used to draw out patterns of interaction, which are subsequently analysed in detail using discourse analytic methods. The end result of this combined approach is detailed case descriptions, including close analysis of key moments of dialogue and contextual notes about, for instance, the content of the lessons, use of technology and pedagogical aims of the teacher.

Pedagogical link-making with new technology Our analysis of science lessons in which new digital technology is used initially revealed the same three broad pedagogical aims for pedagogic link-making, but, at the same time, has led us not only to focus on approaches that seem specific to the activity in which technology is being used but in particular on the process of making these links. It seems to us that, just as pedagogical link-making can support knowledge construction by modelling the connections students need to build during their process of internalisation, pedagogical link-making mediated by networked technology can model the ways in which students will have to develop understanding, in and between contexts where technology is used to engage with new information. This represents a very commonplace context for students nowadays and engages with what has been recognised in the literature as an urgent issue in relation to digital literacy. The following example of classroom dialogue illustrates the way in which a UK secondary school teacher is encouraging students to engage with technology to expand their understanding of a particular science phenomenon; in this instance related to the concept of ‘energy’. This lesson takes place at the beginning of the lesson series on the topic of ‘energy’, and the teacher invited the students to submit questions about energy that they would like to ask and answer in the lesson series. In the example, she is collecting their responses. Example 1: Energy T:

No let’s try – I understand that these questions are interesting; trust me, I would love to have a conversation with gravity with you, but can we leave that for about 2 months, and then we’ll have a conversation about gravity? Because I’d really like to concentrate on energy today? K?

[…] 501

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S4: Does that mean that ultimately everything will lose energy? Because ultimately the sun’s either going to explode or implode. T: Yeah everything will lose energy, because all energy comes from the sun, so we will actually have no energy […] S5: Um you know when it blows up, how long will until we know because, my brothers told me like it will be like over 1,000 years before we actually know because its so far away? T: Some questions that people ask, we don’t actually know the answers to, and that is a brilliant example, of a question that I do not know the answer to. If you want to know the answer, try look it up, exploding sun, and you come back and tell me where you found an answer, you have a look for it. […] S3: Um everything might stop but a battery won’t stop. T: A battery won’t stop? Let me tell you what – H’s come up with a brilliant point. Wait a minute, lets deal with H’s point first and then I’ll come back to you. H said a battery won’t stop, and I agree with you, alright, until it runs out. Right when all the batteries on this earth have run out, where are we going to get the energy from to make more batteries? S1: From the sun. T: But the sun’s been switched off, and all energy – wait a minute. I can only listen to one person at a time, J? S3: We could switch the, uh we could switch the sun back on. T: Yeah I agree with that, this is a mind game that we’re playing. T? S2: But Miss it says on the Ford Ka advert, there’s five billion years of the sun left, make the most of it. As we can see in Example 1, students are providing a multitude of possible questions, and in the first turn, the teacher can be seen to make a conceptual link to the notion of ‘gravity’, and immediately after that, she makes a link to promote continuity, by stating that this is a topic that the class will address in two months’ time.The students keep submitting potential questions that they would like to answer over the coming period, and one student brings up the idea that eventually (when the Sun will explode), everything will lose energy. This prompt gives the teacher a starting point to discuss the concept of ‘conservation of energy’. In Example 1, we first see that the student makes a link to something that was mentioned in the home context, to which the teacher replies that she does not know the answer to that question and actively encourages the student to ‘look it up’ and report the answer back in a later lesson. The key here is that, because of the dialogic nature of the classroom interaction, the students were able to make their own connections between ideas discussed in the classroom and other information, that they gained from out-of-school experiences. We also see that, while networked technology is not actively used in this particular instance, the technology is invoked by the teacher, freeing her up to focus on the particular content of this lesson series, while enabling students to follow up on the content with their own interests and questions. It is interesting to note that she does not ask the student to come back with the answer but to tell her where the student found the answer, possibly as a way to discuss later the validity of information found on the Internet. We see the teacher using pedagogical links to manage students wanting to steer the dialogue towards a topic that is not the one the teacher wants to focus on. On the one hand, 502

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when s­tudents mention ‘gravity’, the teacher has used a continuity link to show the students when they will discuss this topic. On the other hand, when in the course of discussing energy, students ask how long it will take for people on Earth to find out about the end of the Sun when it ‘blows up’, the teacher chooses a different strategy. This is neither a topic that is going to help with the aim of this lesson nor is it a topic that the teacher plans to cover in the future. The teacher asks students to find the explanation themselves, accessing the Internet outside the school. In this case, the knowledge construction pedagogical link was made in the classroom by S4 when they connect the death of the Sun with the end of energy sources on Earth. S5 asks for an expansion of the information related to this link, and the teacher asks students to complete this part of the link. Later on, the teacher uses the prompt of the student who mentions that ‘batteries won’t stop’ as a starting point for a discussion about sources of energy and energy degradation (loss of energy). In the way in which she positions herself as a participant in the dialogue, rather than a source of knowledge, the dialogue opens up, and the students draw the wider context into the classroom, expanding the place and time in which learning takes place. One of the specific approaches to pedagogical link-making presented by Scott and colleagues (2011), referred to linking different types of representations. This is of particular importance in science classrooms, where knowledge is multimodal in nature, and hence linking across representations is essential to construct scientific understanding. This kind of linking benefits greatly from the use of digital networked technology in classrooms, something that was acknowledged by secondary school science teachers in a study by Grimalt (2016). The affordances of digital networked technology for this kind of pedagogical link-making are not restricted to bringing together different media representations of the knowledge but actually make possible the construction of knowledge through different media. In this sense, interactive and networked technology can play an important role in redefining how students build a rich network of representations which provide a more dialogic scientific ‘text’. An illustration of this can be found in the following example (Example 2), in which a science teacher in a Catalan secondary school teaches about different mechanisms producing the collapse of a terrain. Example 2: Ground subsidence and collapse In this class all students use tablets to access the digital teaching material that has been designed by the teacher. This material includes links to text, picture and video files as well as embedded science modelling applets. The classroom has two whiteboards, side by side. The teacher uses one of them to project the digital material and the other one to write (see Figure 34.1). These differentiated uses are replicated by the students who access the digital information with their tablets but take notes with pen and paper. The teacher couples this ‘technological diglossia’ with pedagogical links across different modes of representation to support knowledge building. In doing so the teacher models for the students how to look at images of a phenomena (like a picture of a geological formation) and how to make a scientific representation of this phenomena through a multimodal text including visual representations of the salient features and processes as well as written language information such as labels and short explanations. In this session, the teacher also asks students to visit a newspaper website to find news related to the scientific topic they are working on. In this case the teacher guides the students to a particular piece of news that students access individually with their tablets. The teacher then asks the students to read the news and to interpret the text and the accompanying graphs using the geological concepts they have been d­ iscussing. 503

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Figure 34.1 Differentiated use (present information vs. build/edit information) of white boards.

The teacher opens up the dialogic space of the classroom by inviting an external frame of reference into the classroom dialogue. During the dialogue that ensues, the teacher and the students link scientific concepts with everyday explanations and real phenomena, as well as linking the scientific representations that have been built during the lesson with media outside the classroom. Overall, the teacher is using the technology to bring into the dialogue a realistic context for a competence-oriented science education. We argue that the technology mediation is not just convenient here; it actually brings into the classroom the media that students use outside of school to access information and, hence, it becomes a realistic exercise on linking classroom constructed knowledge to out-of-the-school reasoning. The teacher is helping to expand the learning space and dialogic space of the classroom, in effect permeating the walls of the classroom, both from the outside in and from the inside out.We would argue here that the expansion of the learning space happens not only because more ideas are being introduced by the students but also because, critically, the teacher is integrating and using these ideas within the trajectory of the curriculum to develop the students’ understanding of science. The end result is a linked text, not dissimilar to a hyperlinked text on the computer, although while in the computer the links are physical links, in a dialogue, the links are integrated as the voices of others. The previous two examples illustrate the different pedagogical links generated by teachers invoking the use of networked technology to foster students’ extension of the classroom dialogue after school and the use of this technology in the classroom to open up the dialogue with out-of-school inputs. We have seen similar examples in different schools in our data from the UK and Catalonia. However, it proved much less common in our data to find examples of students bringing unfiltered voices co-opted through networked technology into the classroom dialogue.We argue that while, on the one hand, networked technology affords students to bring into the dialogue information that is closer to their interests and helps to reinforce their argu-

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ments, on the other hand, it implies that the teacher must give up more control of the dialogic space. Even though teachers who engage with technology in their practice usually have a positive view on how it affects students’ learning, they look for ways to channel students’ inputs, so that these actually rarely enter the classroom dialogue as unfiltered voices. The following example (Example 3) presents two vignettes that exemplify ways in which teachers enabled this ‘channelling’ in two different schools in Catalonia, drawn from interviews with teachers in one of our projects. Example 3: Students’ ‘unfiltered’ voices in the classroom dialogue The first teacher does not always plan for the students to use laptops or tablets in her lessons, but she prepares a lot of material for the students in the school virtual environment and makes extensive use of the interactive white board. Her rationale seems to be that students should work collaboratively as a group in her lessons but have the chance of following a more personalised path when working outside the classroom. To include the students’ inputs from their own searches in the class dialogue she uploads some of them to the virtual learning environment, making sure to identify the student who has made the contribution (pedagogical link to encourage emotional engagement) as well as explaining how it relates to the rest of the information they are using (pedagogical link to support knowledge building). While the student’s voice is incorporated ‘unfiltered’, the teacher does select what she considers to be relevant contributions. The second teacher has a different approach to the use of networked technology. He sees this technology as allowing him to develop a more personalised practice in the classroom. In the sessions we observed, his students used laptops to access information and to write down notes during a series of lab sessions on chemistry where they worked in small groups. For most of the sessions, students were following what the teacher had prepared, and the dialogue was focused on the information provided in the digital book. The last part of the activity, however, required students to contrast their results with information they had to find on the Internet. The teacher then discussed with each small group to analyse both their results and the process of finding, selecting, critically appraising and linking to the classroom activity the information each group had found. In this case, the students’ voices entered the dialogue completely unfiltered, and the teacher had to help them, not just to establish links with scientific knowledge, but to reflect on the validity of the information they had found.

Implications for theory and practice Networked technology has the potential to change the scope and process of learning at both social and cognitive levels. Nevertheless, it is not the introduction in the classroom of the technology itself that will bring about these changes. ‘It is in the combination of technology with reflection and dialogue that students learn to think’ (Wegerif, 2015, p. 438). This potential is closely related to the affordances of this technology for opening the dialogic space, for making the space and time borders of school and out-of-school education more permeable. As we have seen from our examples, students make links between information gathered in the home context and new information presented by the teacher, and these links become resources for learning in educational dialogues (Silseth, 2018).While there has been much research on the

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ways in which learning takes place across a variety of contexts (see for example Barton & Tan, 2009; Bronkhorst & Akkerman, 2016), there has been a dearth of research on the ways in which digital technology introduces a new context for the teachers and students to engage with and in particular, how the networked technology, in the form of mobile networked devices, becomes an unlimited context to draw on in the classroom. Networked digital technology provides a common medium through which information found outside of school and presented in school can be brought together, a medium which brings information that resides both in and out of the school into the thinking processes and dialogues around a particular problem. These dialogues themselves reside both in and out of the school, and from within the school, the technology serves as a door to open classroom discourse to outside voices. Networking technology is thus not just about opening students to new information but rather adapting formal education to be part of the ‘windows’ through which students interact with the (hyper)culture they inhabit (Han, 2018). It is about making the information in the classroom meaningful, and connectable, to the outside world, as the students experience it. On the one hand, it helps to position the students as expert; on the other hand, the information directly co-opted from digital media can foster the participation of students who might have been stopped by not being able to present their views in a more ‘professional’ form. This increased capacity to bring into the dialogue and to work with richer multimodal information is very important for science, due to the multimodal nature of the knowledge it generates (Lemke, 1990).This has a direct effect on enriching the pedagogical links that can be enacted, by teachers and students, to connect different modes of representation. The blurring of the space and time boundaries in school/out-of-school learning, which is closely connected to the life-long learning paradigm, means that students are expected to engage in more competence-oriented learning, closely connected with their capacity for learning using networked technology. This provides new challenges for teachers and involves pedagogic linkmaking of a more generic kind than described by Scott and colleagues (2011). Where normally, teachers would model specific connections between two pieces of knowledge, they now have to help students understand how to make their own connections between ideas discussed in the classroom and other information, which has not been specified or selected beforehand by the teacher. One of the consequences of this may be that the focus of teaching should shift from the content to be linked to addressing how content can be linked and how students should engage with the linked content. In our examples, we see the teacher not only inviting students to draw on their own everyday experience, thus expanding the dialogic space of the classroom, but also integrating the students’ ideas within the science curriculum and, importantly, helping students to establish the validity of the information by modelling and filtering the external voices. This implies that the teachers have to consider a learning process that they cannot map completely since it might branch out into networks that are, in part, personal to each student. Hence, teachers need to model continuity and knowledge-building links for students to be able to navigate that network. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that the navigation itself is a learning activity, for it asks from the students to establish those links. For students, to be able to engage with web-based materials and to be able to link with what they already know and what they hear in the classroom becomes an essential skill. This shift towards competence learning is possible because information is readily available to students via interactive technology and hence, teaching time can be freed up to focus more on fostering these essential learning skills by focusing on how to select, evaluate and connect information in everyday contexts. However, it is important to focus on where information is coming from, as students are bringing in unfiltered voices into the classroom dialogue. While this element of unfiltered voices creates dialogic opportunities in the classroom, as it allows 506

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each individual to engage with the information in different ways, at the same time it also creates new challenges, both for the teacher and the students. Future research should therefore aim to focus more on the different types of pedagogic links with new technology, how they affect the quality of learning (both the skills needed for life-long, out-of-the-school learning and the learning of specific topics) and how they affect the engagement with learning dialogues, for instance by exploring the sense of agency derived from a more active role, on the definition of the dialogic space.

References Alexander, R. J. (2000). Culture and Pedagogy: International Comparisons in Primary Education. Oxford: Blackwell. Alexander, R. J. (2017). Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk (5th edn).York: Dialogos. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas. Barton, A. C. & Tan, E. (2009). Funds of knowledge and discourses and hybrid space. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 46(1), 50–73. Barwell, R. (2016). Formal and informal mathematical discourses: Bakhtin and Vygotsky, dialogue and dialectic. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 92(3), 331–345. Bronkhorst, L. H., & Akkerman, S. F. (2016). At the boundary of school: Continuity and discontinuity in learning across contexts. Educational Research Review, 19, 18–35. Erstad, O. (2014). The expanded classroom-spatial relations in classroom practices using ICT. Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, 1, 8–21. Freire, P. (1986). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Grimalt-Álvaro, C. (2016). La tecnologia a les classes de ciències de secundària: Anàlisi dels processos de canvi en el professorat. PhD Thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Retrieved from http://www. tdx.cat/handle/10803/367210 Grimalt-Alvaro, C., Pintó, R., & Ametller, J. (2013). La utilización del aula digital en las clases de ciencias de secundaria. Alambique: Didáctica de las ciencias experimentales, 75, 91–98. Han, B. C. (2018). Hiperculturalidad. Barcelona: Herder. Kumpulainen, K., & Mikkola, A. (2014). Boundary crossing of discourses in pupils’ chat interaction during computer-mediated collaboration. Learning Culture and Social Interaction, 3, 43–53. Kumpulainen, K. & Rajala, A. (2017). Negotiating time-space contexts in students’ technology-mediated interaction during a collaborative learning activity. International Journal of Educational Research, 84, 90–99. Larochelle, M., Bednarz, N., & Garrison, J. (Eds.). (1998). Constructivism and Education. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Leander, K. M., Phillips, N. C., & Taylor, K. H. (2010).The changing social spaces of learning: Mapping new mobilities. Review of Research in Education, 34, 329–394. Lemke, J. L. (1990). Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Norwood, MA: Ablex. Martin, L. C., & Towers, J. (2015). Growing mathematical understanding through collective image making, collective image having, and collective property noticing. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 88(1), 3–18. Mercer, N. (2004). Sociocultural discourse analysis. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 137–168. Mercer, N. (2008). The seeds of time: Why classroom dialogue needs a temporal analysis. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 17(1), 33–59. Mercer, N., Dawes, L., Kleine Staarman, J. (2009). Dialogic teaching in the primary science classroom. Language and Education, 23(4), 353–369. Silseth, K. (2018). Students’ everyday knowledge and experiences as resources in educational dialogues. Instructional Science, 46(2), 291–313. Scott, P., & Ametller, J. (2007). Teaching science in a meaningful way: Striking a balance between ‘opening up’ and ‘closing down’ classroom talk. School Science Review, 88(324), 77. Scott, P., Mortimer, E. & Ametller, J. (2011). Pedagogical link-making: A fundamental aspect of teaching and learning scientific conceptual knowledge. Studies in Science Education, 47(1), 3–36. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Volume 1: Problems of General Psychology, Including the Volume Thinking and Speech (R. W. Rieber & A. S. Carton Eds., N. Minick Trans.). New York: Plenum Press.

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35 TRIANGULATING IDENTITY, GROUPS AND OBJECTS A university case M. Beatrice Ligorio, Francesca Amenduni and Katherine McLay

Introduction University plays a key role in preparing students for professional life. As such, improving learning and teaching so that students are well positioned to take on professional roles is an important issue in higher education. According to the NMC Horizon Report, universities should be “incubators of high-quality products – actual inventions and developments that progress positive trends, as well as the most important product of all: graduates who not only fulfil evolving job market needs but redefine and improve the workforce they enter” (Becker et al., 2017 p. 6). In practice, however, students’ transition to the workplace is not always smooth (Eteläpelto, Vähäsantanen, Hökkä, & Paloniemi, 2014; Hytonen, Palonen, Lehtinen, & Hakkarainen, 2016). In response to this problem, some universities are developing programmes that interconnect with workplaces using technology (Trede et al., 2016). While the purposes and goals of tertiary education are many and varied, our interest is in innovative theoretical approaches that enhance connections between formal learning and workplace contexts, thereby supporting students to enter professional life. To illustrate one such innovative approach, we first outline our theoretical framework. We then describe the university course we have developed, supported by over a decade of research. Finally, we illustrate how this innovative approach improves learning outcomes and supports tertiary students’ transition from formal learning to professional life.

Theoretical framework Our research is underpinned by the dialogical approach together with the so-called trialogical learning approach.These two theoretical frameworks are well connected to each other, with the latter further developing the role of materiality and object-building within the learning process. The objects constructed under the trialogical framework are – in our case – tangible artefacts produced through interaction between university and professional corporations. The process of building these objects is dialogical and involves individuals, groups and material and immaterial instruments. These elements are foundational to the university course we developed. The crucial role of dialogue in effective learning and teaching is widely recognised (Linell, 1998; Mercer, 2000). Drawing on Vygotsky (1978; 1986), many scholars have studied how 509

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argumentation, discussion and comparison between different points of view enhance learning (Jiménez-Aleixandre, 2007; Schwarz, 2009; Schwarz & Baker, 2016; Simon, Erduran & Osborne, 2006). One of the reasons dialogue is considered effective in education is that it supports “interthinking” (Mercer, 2000) – a dynamically interactive process in which ideas are not only shared but shaped (Stahl, 2003). Through dialogue, language is a tool for the joint creation of knowledge. Importantly, however, a dialogical approach is not synonymous with dialogue. Bakhtin (1981; 1986) conceives dialogism as leaving space for many interpretations, thus a dialogical approach involves openness to different perspectives and the tension that arises from encountering different, often opposing, ideas (Alexander, 2008; Ligorio & César, 2013; Matusov, 2004; Wegerif, 2001; Wertsch, 2013). In education, these concepts can support a pedagogical and philosophical shift from approaches that direct students toward one “right” conceptualisation (logic), to approaches that work to open up “spaces” for thinking so students can engage with diverse ideas, possible solutions and new advancements (dialogism). Recent scholarship has increasingly explored the role of digital technology in mediating, supporting and extending dialogic exchanges (Ligorio, Annese & Wegerif, 2015; Wegerif, 2007), and computer-mediated dialogue is increasingly recognised as a powerful tool to support dialogical knowledge and identity ­building (Chan, van Aalst & Tong, Chapter 32 in this volume; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003). We conceptualise identity according to Dialogical Self Theory (Hermans, 2001) which considers the Self as composed of various I-positions. These positions can be internal (e.g., I-as-student) and external (e.g., my fellow students). The various I-positions interact within the Self, and new positions can be generated through this process, especially when new contexts, ideas and people are encountered. However, we feel that dialogical perspectives do not take sufficient account of how identity positions emerge as a social, transformative process (Vianna & Stetsenko, 2011). A trialogical approach, however, considers the relationship not only between internal and external I-positions but also takes account of the role played by collaboratively built boundary objects. We conceive digitally mediated dialogue as cultivating a specific type of knowledge building which includes identity work, framed within the trialogical approach (Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2005). In trialogical learning settings, students collaboratively develop new objects of inquiry, such as knowledge artefacts, practices, ideas, models and representations. These objects support and structure interactions because dialogue is focused on them through collaborative planning, creation and development. A trialogical perspective does not require unanimous agreement or common understanding of these shared objects, but it nevertheless provides “a concrete reference point which can then be collaboratively modified and clarified during the process” (Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2009, p. 12). Both dialogue and trialogue are required to realise trialogical work (Paavola & Hakkarainen, 2009). In this way, dialogue supports the construction of “boundary-objects” – objects designed by one community (e.g., tertiary students) but intended for use in another (e.g., customers of e-learning entrepreneurs). Boundary-objects help manage the tension arising from different perspectives (Bowker & Star, 1999) and are used to investigate cooperation in various contexts, including education (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011; Banner Donnelly & Ryder, 2012; Carlile, 2002; Kim & Herbert, 2012; Kumpulainen, Rajala & Kajamaa, Chapter 30 in this volume; Lee, 2005). Our interest lies in how boundary-objects function in dialogic exchanges to support individual and group identity positions during transaction from one context (university) to another (professional contexts).

Trialogical university course For the past ten years, we have been experimenting with ways of integrating trialogical principles into university courses. Specifically, how the construction of “trialogical objects” 510

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can support transaction between formal learning and professional life – a model we report on here in relation to a 13-week Educational psychology and e-learning course. The course is part of a Master of Psychology degree and comprises two modules. Module 1 (M1) covered the curriculum content that included advanced notions of educational psychology and collaboration online, such as knowledge building, CSCL, dialogical approaches. Module 2 (M2) focused on activities performed in concert with companies operating in the e-learning market. The course takes a blended learning approach, integrating both online and off-line activities (Graham, 2006). M1 started with a face-to-face lecture, which introduced the aims and the structure of the course. To familiarise with the digital environment, students participated in an informal web-forum discussion via ForumCommunity (FC).1 During the first week, the teacher divided the students into “expert” groups of between four and ten students. The teacher then allocated study material corresponding to the number of students in each group. Finally, a challenging focus question related to the study material was negotiated with students; this question guided subsequent activities. One example of a focus question was, “What learning theories can account for the tools and instruments deployed in e-learning and distance education?”. The aim was to avoid a transmission approach to learning and trigger a more progressive inquiry approach (Hakkarainen, 2003). In their “expert” groups, students discussed the materials in relation to their focus. Once the “expert” discussion ended, students were individually required to write a brief review using a template. In these reviews, students highlighted the content relevant to the focus question; these were posted to Google Drive folders once complete. To support constructive collaboration, new groups were formed, composed of students from different “expert” groups or “Jigsaw groups” (Aronson & Bridgeman, 1979). Each expert group collated their answers to the focus question, drawing on these to collaboratively create a concept map. Students were required to take on specific roles in the groups. Based on Role Taking theory (Cesareni, Cacciamani & Fujita, 2016; Fischer, Kollar, Stegmann, & Wecker, 2013), these roles were designed to support students to take responsibility and actively participate. Some of the roles used were: (i) leader of web-forum group discussions, responsible for monitoring assignments and deadlines and checking that all participants are active; (ii) collaborative product manager, in charge of preparing a first draft of the map based on individual input and soliciting feedback from each participant; (iii) researcher, responsible for locating relevant and useful information. The overall goal of M2 was to put into practice what students had learned in M1.To achieve this aim, a group of students (no more than ten) was assigned to a participating e-learning company. Some of these companies are experienced, having participated in the course for several years. Newcomer companies received guidelines we developed in consultation with the more experienced companies. Representatives from each company introduced themselves and the company via Skype, webinars or in person and described the object they proposed students would construct, jointly supervised by a mentor from the company and a university tutor. Expert and Jigsaw groups were also formed in M2 and worked in a similar way to M1: expert groups worked with the same company; Jigsaw groups comprised of students working with different companies. Students maintained their e-Portfolios throughout both modules, first on FC and later on LinkedIn. Within the e-Portfolio, a special role was introduced, called “friend of zone of proximal development” (friend of ZPD). Each student nominated another trusted participant in the course to be their friend of ZPD. The friend of ZPD monitored the performance of the nominating student and offered personal opinions, comments, tips and advice to support progress. 511

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Research questions In this section we will report empirical results guided by two reserach questions: (a) Can the activities around shared boundary objects support transaction between communities (university and professional)? (b) How are perceptions of the self and of the collaborative groups shaped during such transactions? To answer these research questions, we drew on theory around the dialogical nature of identity (Hermans, 2001) and the concept of positioning (Harré, 1980) embedded into Hermans’ theory. We consider our course a new and challenging experience able to trigger new I-positions at the borders between university and professional communities (Amenduni & Ligorio, 2017). In particular, role-taking and the role of friend of ZPD trigger opportunities to activate new positions (Impedovo, Ligorio & McLay, 2018; Sansone, Ligorio & Buglass, 2016) as students demonstrate initiative and take on roles that would not otherwise arise. Similarly, information, reflections and ideas captured in the e-Portfolios made visible interesting narratives around positioning. Additionally, a focus group conducted at the end of the course (Barbour & Kitzinger, 1999) generated data in relation to student perceptions of the course experience.The focus group data offers insight into students’ identity work and group perception as they grapple with the role played by the trialogical objects they created.

The corpus of data and participants The data we are referring in this chapter were generated during the academic years 2015–2016 and 2016–2017 and drawn from 34 participant students (average age = 22.6) and 42 students (average age = 24) respectively. None of these students had previous experience with university courses delivered in blended mode or other innovative teaching techniques. For the e-Portfolio analysis, we selected the most complete student e-Portfolios (N. = 17; 11 from female students and six from male students). We had a total of 132 notes distributed between M1 (FC) and M2 (LinkedIn). Each note was divided into analytical segments that we call “utterances” able to capture concrete relational acts of communication with others (Davies & Renshaw, 2013) and make visible the various I-positions that students take up. We also considered two FG sessions involving 11 students: five in the first (four females and one male) and six in the second (all females). Each FG session was comprised of two steps. First, a four-minute video-clip about the most salient moments of the course and second, a semistructured discussion based on four questions.Two questions focused on the students’ perception of effectiveness of the course, and two explored the students’ perception of his or her individual I-positions and of the group’s shared or collective identity positions.

The analysis Data from both e-Portfolios and the FG discussions were analysed using qualitative content analysis (Holsti, 1968; Riff, Lacy & Fico, 2014). In particular, we were interested in utterances that revealed how students perceived themselves, the groups they worked with and the objects

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they built. While there are varied approaches to and conceptions of Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Morse et al., 2016), our approach involved building the analytic categories over several cycles of data reading, rooted in both the guiding theories and our research questions. All the qualitative analyses were performed by two independent coders who compared their results and discussed the divergent cases with a third researcher. After three cycles of comparison, unanimous agreement on the categorisation was reached. To analyse the data generated by the e-Portfolios we used the concept of “I-positions” (Harré, 1980; Hermans, 2001). We first built a grid of positions that captured the boundarycrossing process. The positions found were clustered into three categories: monologic, dialogic and trialogic. Monologic positions are internal positions (e.g., I think, I am a student, I want to … ); dialogic positions define the relationship between two or more positions (e.g., my colleague told me, the tutor said to us, my group); and trialogic positions represent the relationship among internal or external positions and a shared object. The final grid of positioning is reported in Table 35.1. Once the whole corpus of data was coded, we extrapolated the occurrence of these positions. With respect to the two FG discussions, these were first transcribed in full, and later the coders looked for similar as well as divergent statements about three categories: self-perception; sense of group; and perception of changes.

Table 35.1 Grid of positioning categories Monologic positions Personal position Student position Formal role Professional position Meta-Positioning Past position Present position Future position Promoter Position Dialogic positions

Peer otherness Teacher/tutors otherness Professional otherness Shared object – personal

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Shared object – intra-student groups Shared object among students and future target

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Personal emotions, ideas, attitude I as student I as tutor [one of the roles assigned during the course] I as skilful, oriented to professional role Reflections about the current position Positions in the past Positions in the present Positions in the future Giving support and suggestions to another student Explicit or implicit reference to other students Explicit or implicit reference to tutors and teacher Explicit or implicit reference to professional tutors Interaction between a student and the object Interaction between students of the same group and the object Reference to people who can reuse the shared object

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Results The e-Portfolio analysis makes it possible to look closely at the changes occurring between M1 and M2, while the FG discussions provide a broad overview of how students perceive their experience in the course.

E-Portfolio: monologic, dialogic and trialogic positions We first report the differences between the two modules composing the course and then compare FC and LinkedIn. The quantitative results (frequencies and percentage) are complemented with extracts from the e-Portfolio notes. Figure 35.1 and Figure 35.2 synthesise the results of the occurrence analysis from three macro-categories: monological, dialogical and trialogical positions. These data suggest that monologic positions dominated the e-Portfolio, which seems logical given that the e-Portfolios are personal documents in which students are reflecting on their own experiences, contributions, strengths and weaknesses. Dialogic positions are similarly distributed across the two modules, but when comparing FC e-Portfolios to those in LinkedIn, e-Portfolios in FC are much more dialogical (53% versus 11%). One way of understanding these data is by considering the different audiences and purposes of these media – LinkedIn is a platform for curating a professional “identity”, not unlike a digital, professional “gallery” or curriculum vitae.While people can share information and interact on LinkedIn, the medium of FC explicitly involves participants in interaction and engagement in ways that LinkedIn does not. Interestingly, trialogical positions are more frequent in the second module than in the first (21% versus 2%), and in LinkedIn more than in FC (22% versus 8%). Perhaps this increase suggests that, over time, students are engaging more often and deeply and/or becoming more confident 120% Module 1

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Figure 35.1 Occurrence analyses – macro categories position in M1 and M2.

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Figure 35.2 Occurrence analyses – macro categories position in ForumCommunity and LinkedIn.

about and involved with the artefacts they are jointly creating. In terms of LinkedIn, we suggest that the increase in trialogical positions may illustrate the role of these jointly created artefacts as boundary-objects that support the transition to professional life. Given that LinkedIn is a space for curating and displaying professional experience and aptitude, the increase in trialogical positions could be attributed to students exploiting the affordances and purposes of this medium to foreground their collaboration with industry partners. In the following extract, we see an example of a trialogical position reported in LinkedIn as Carla integrates her monological “self ” (“I worked …”), professional “otherness” (the company, Eulab) and the artefact they collaboratively created (“an app for professional guidance”). Extract 1. Carla (M2, LinkedIn)

“I worked with the company called Eulab to develop an app for professional guidance during the ‘E-learning psychology’ course. The app is aimed at supporting young people to build their professional career and to face market labour challenges”. In Carla’s utterance, we can see how the app – a shared object – operates as a concrete point of reference between Carla and Eulab. As a collaboratively created artefact, the app operates as a boundary-object and provides a novel pathway for Carla to transition from her student position to a professional position. Similarly, we found that the friend of ZPD plays a crucial role in promoting a shift toward trialogical positions. Consider the following commentary in Alessia’s e-Portfolio, made by her friend of ZPD. Extract 2. Alessia’s friend of ZDP (M1, FC)

“I confirm these are your skills because I had the opportunity to work with you and I have to say you have great team management skills.You are able to motivate collaboration among group members and help members to respect group deadlines. Why don’t you talk about the e-learning 515

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skills you acquired? For example, you could add information about the use of Drive and the e-learning platform. ;-)” Alessia had not included any digital skills she had acquired in the Zone of Actual Development section in her e-Portfolio. However, upon receiving this input from her friend of ZPD, she reflected on and re-examined her learning experience. Through dialogue with her friend of ZPD as mediated by the e-Portfolio, Alessia took up a novel position in relation to her own learning story. Extract 3. Alessia (M1, FC)

“Actually, I was undecided whether to include the skills you suggested because at the start of the course I felt very clumsy in using this forum … But because of my determination and persistence I now categorise myself as ‘Plus student’.2 So I had to improve in this field”. Alessia’s utterance illustrates a novel identity position that incorporates the use of digital tools as a new element, illustrating how a trialogical position can arise through the mediating instrument of tools needed to build a trialogical object. It is important to note that trialogical positions do not exclude monological and dialogical positions but build upon each other. This interconnection is apparent in the exchange between Alessia and her friend of ZPD, who triggers Alessia’s engagement with a novel trialogical position (E4) by posing a question that prompts rethinking and critical self-reflection on learning. Extract 4. Alessia’s friend of ZPD (M2, FC)

“I confirm the skills you acquired, Alessia! You are a goal-oriented leader. What else would you like to learn in the future?” To answer this question, Alessia must articulate a possible future. Extract 5. Alessia (M2, FC)

“I hope the object we built fits the customer’s needs and will be appreciated and considered as a good product by future readers”. Here, Alessia makes clear reference to the trialogical object (the e-book), but a monological position remains evident (“I hope …”). There is also a reference to a dialogical or shared dimension in Alessia’s use of a plural pronoun (“we built”). In this way, we see that the e-book functions as a boundary-object to support Alessia’s transition toward a professional context, evident in an imagined future trajectory in which the object is appreciated and considered a “good product”. We suggest that this approach to closely interrogating utterances that are captured in the e-Portfolio makes visible the identity work associated with transitioning from tertiary education to professional life. The friend of ZPD role supports participant students to take up dialogical relationships (i) with one another through the mediating tool of the e-Portfolio and (ii) with corporations through the mediating tool of jointly constructed boundary-objects. Thus, the e-Portfolios and the boundary-objects are manifestations of the trialogical approach – artefacts that support the transition from formal learning to professional contexts by anchoring dialogical exchanges that support learners to take up new, often professional, I-positions. 516

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Results from the FG: perception of the self, the group and the changes a) Self-perception One common observation made by the students is that the course helped them to discover new dimensions, such as personal characteristics or skills they had not previously recognised. For example, Alessia recognises her “determination and persistence”. Other students realised they were different from how they usually saw themselves – Role Taking was key to this. Consider Extract 6. Extract 6. FG 1, Intervention no. 3

“For example, personally, I would never have chosen that role, because I am very insecure, shy, and so on. So it’s not … I would not have felt up to it. The fact that it was imposed on me helped me get a lot out of it, and then I found myself at ease with it, and ultimately I managed it quite well”. For this student, the Role Taking technique helped her to overcome some personal traits that had arguably been limiting in the past, such as shyness. Role Taking stretched and challenged the student, who ultimately developed greater confidence in her own capacity. Participant students also indicate that they have developed relational and time management skills, the capacity to consider different points of view, as well as skills considered useful in professional life, for example, writing a review, exploiting the affordances of Google Drive and understanding the role and function of “learning objects”. In short, they felt enriched and empowered. b) Sense of the group A complex perception of the group emerged from the FG discussions, with positive as well as negative elements. For example, dynamics of conflict and confrontation are reported, but these are ultimately considered stimulating occasions for personal growth and change. This stance is synergistic with Bakhtin’s view that struggle and tension is an unavoidable and indeed necessary element of “becoming” someone through dialogical relationships and interactions (Lillis, 2003). The continuous re-mixing of the four groups (two expert groups and two Jigsaw groups) and involvement in activities that required high levels of collaboration forced the students to engage with each other to navigate tensions and differences. In this way, the students developed new relational skills. Some participants felt they had learned how to manage conflict through negotiation, while others felt they had become much more patient. Participants valued these outcomes particularly highly as a source of personal enrichment. Extract 7. FG 1, Intervention no. 36

“And then also for example the fact that I was a person who tended to work alone and here I had to be open to negotiation and to group work, this made me perceive the other as able to enrich ehm … to enrich me and to expand my resources also from a cognitive point of view. And this path was very nice”. Here, we see a clear shift from the original I-position (I-as-working alone) to a new I-position (I-as-collaborator and negotiator). Further, it is evident that the group work led to the emergence of another I-position – a shared identity through identification with the group itself. 517

Ligorio, Amenduni and McLay Extract 8. FG 2. Interventions nos. 9–11

“In my case, I almost lost my individuality, that is, I was talking as if I were the group, right? Because in all this journey, that is mmm … yes, individuality is clear that it existed, because everyone contributed their own contribution, but let’s say the group is stronger, right? And so in the end I’ve probably found myself using a language … ” “Plural” “And yes, I was talking as if the group were talking, right? Because it seemed to me mmm … to say shared things”. In this exchange, we see the participants completing each other’s thoughts, affirming a shared sense of group identity. Interestingly, this group identification was extended to identifying with the company they worked with in M2, evident in the following extract. Extract 9. FG 2. Interventions nos. 13–14

“In fact, at the end a sort of … exactly, sense of belonging … I’m from Lattanzio [one of the companies involved in the course], you’re from Osel [another company]”. Indeed, many participants perceived changing groups as an opportunity to know and work with different people, as well as avoiding stagnation in the same group. The process of identification with a group is inferred by the use of “us” and the verbal form in the first-person plural. We suggest that this not only refers to the activities carried out in a group but also indicates the emergence of new I-positions. Consider the following extract. Extract 10. FG 1. Interventions no. 6

“for example at the beginning we had … we had to engage with the blended model proposed to us, totally unknown, therefore as a group we were clumsy and confused, eh … later we acquired the ability to work in groups efficiently, to reflect together on what to do”. Here, the student makes visible a group identity position that shifts over time. Initially (“at the beginning”) “we” (the group) were “clumsy and confused” when first engaging with the blended learning approach, but over time (“later”), the group became more efficient and able to work together to navigate a new model of learning. c) Perceptions of change The most relevant change reported by our students is that their initial negative feelings about a novel approach to teaching and learning shifted over time. Students expressed anxiety about what they initially perceived as high levels of demand and pressure. Over time, however, students recognised that, as they were exposed to increasingly complex concepts and skills, their own capacity also increased. Extract 11. FG 2. Intervention no. 3

“The work was gradual.We started with small objectives or tasks such as maps, reviews, informal discussions, and then found ourselves working with somewhat more complex processes, and a more demanding task given by companies”. 518

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Even if M2 was perceived as requiring more commitment and responsibility because of the contact with companies, it was simultaneously perceived as less stressful, and students predominantly felt enthused and motivated by the challenge of engaging with companies to develop a shared artefact. Students demonstrate awareness that collaboration is an important part of engaging with challenges and achieving goals. Students felt a sense of shared commitment and gave their best in group work situations. Extract 12. FG 1. Intervention no. 43

“I was happy to say that I had to come to class, I was thrilled that I had a challenge eh … to be addressed … that is, I felt motivated”. For our students, a key benefit of the approach to teaching and learning in this course is the opportunity to dialogue with other participants and engage in collaborative learning. Students perceive that this has supported the development and enhancement of interpersonal skills. Finally, the acquisition of new skills, awareness and mastery of new mediational means, as well as a better knowledge of the professional world around e-learning, led to a change in how students see their future projects. At the end of the course, students felt confident they could transfer the skills acquired during the course to professional contexts. One participant is already actively engaged in this transition in his existing role working for a company. Extract 13. FG2. Intervention no. 28

“I have stolen everything I learnt. I stole the platform ((laughter)) I confess, I used it at work, I showed it to my boss. I did it for my company. I used ForumCommunity as we used it here, and I introduced Google Drive. I have stolen everything ((laughter)), everything.Yes, it’s fantastic and we’re already having tremendous results, that is, I have … I’ve really used it and I’ve used it thanks to the principles we learned during the course”.

Discussion and conclusion In this chapter, we have illustrated how a purposely designed university course can triangulate identity, groups and objects. This triangulation is predicated on collaborative dialogue which focuses on the construction of digital artefacts in accordance with the principles of trialogical learning. These objects are designed in collaboration with external agents – in our case, e-learning companies – and respond to a two-fold aim. First, the objects allow students to put the theoretical concepts underpinning the course into practice. Second, the digital artefacts function as “boundary” objects, supporting students to transition from university to professional contexts. This process involves the students taking up new identity positions. To analyse the effects of the course we designed, we focused on two types of data. First, the utterances captured in deliberately designed e-Portfolio spaces and coupled with a new role, friend of ZPD, which targeted and cultivated the dialogical nature of the e-Portfolio. Second, the FG discussions at the end of the course were specifically designed to draw out students’ perceptions of shifts in their individual and group identity positions and of the course more generally. With respect to the e-Portfolio, we analyse students’ utterances to make visible their shifting identity positions (I-as-learner, I-as-professional) and consider the impact of the friend of ZPD and their work with the companies.We focused on three types of identity positions – monologi519

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cal, dialogical and trialogical – and found that different types of e-Portfolio exchanges encourage students to take up different identity positions in relation to one another and themselves. We suggest that FC stimulated self-reflection, while dialogue with the friend of ZPD and the representatives of the companies triggered a proliferation of I-positions. We were particularly struck by the fact that, at the outset of the course, many students stated that they did not feel confident with the critical self-reflection the task required. The structure of the course appeared to help students overcome this challenge; their utterances can be understood as shifting from reporting identity positions in a rather shallow and dry manner (such as a list) to a more thoughtful narrative style that included feelings and reflections (Bruner, 1991). In contrast, LinkedIn stimulated the emergence of trialogical positions because of its professional nature, particularly in M2 where the activities were based on the companies’ outlines. As an overarching observation, we suggest that the role of the friend of ZPD plays a crucial role in the emergence of new I-positions and that the “trialogical objects” can powerfully mediate the transaction from I-as-student to I-as-future-professional. The results from FG discussions offer insight into students’ shifting perception of their I-positions and of shared group I-positions throughout the course. We suggest that students perceive their experience in the course as an opportunity to discover new I-positions, including strengths, weaknesses and an emerging sense of their trajectory as future professionals.The Role Taking technique supported this process, as did the collaborative structure of the course. In both cases, the aspect students value most highly is the possibility of dialogical interaction with different points of view to support deeper learning.This is evident in student talk during the focus groups, where they express a sense that their initial disorientation slowly transformed into the ability to manage time and pressure, as well as more demanding tasks, both at university and in relation to interactions with the participating companies. We believe that the design and implementation of this course offers one way of responding to urgent calls to innovate university teaching and learning by building stronger connections to the professional world. Requiring students to collaboratively design and build a trialogical object in consultation with external stakeholders (professionals) holds promise as a tool for supporting learners to transition from formal educational settings to professional life. This transition manifests in the development of new (individual) I-positions as well as in new shared or group positions which enhance and support learning. Students report more self-confidence and an increased capacity to acquire new skills and knowledge. They could also see the usefulness of these skills in a professional context. The collaboratively built objects entered into their I-positions to become part of what students do, “who” students are and “who” students see themselves becoming as professionals. Similarly, the group work, which was a critical element of the course, contributed to the students taking up new I-positions as they learned how to leverage dialogical interactions to improve the quality of their work. As Kumpulainen, Rajala and Kajamaa (Chapter 30 in this volume) claim, introducing materiality extends current understandings of dialogic education. In our case, materiality is represented by objects designed within a formal learning context (university) but with and for external consumers and stakeholders. Star and Griesemer (1989) contend that material objects can operate as boundary objects, which can expand into and be embraced by the various learning spaces students occupy, for example, the physical classroom, the digital world, university learning contexts and the companies students interact with – both directly (by working collaboratively with them) and indirectly (by observing and commenting on the work other groups do with different companies). Technology played a key role, although it gradually became almost invisible. Students initially indicated they felt overwhelmed by the demands of the course – including the use of technol520

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ogy – but over time, technology became a useful mediating instrument. Reported difficulties with using the digital tools dwindled as students recognised the relevance and potential of these tools to a profession or workplace. Technology contributed to creating a network that not only enhanced group collaboration but also made it possible to interweave the university context and external stakeholders (Staarman and Ametller, Chapter 34, in this volume). Introducing the task of collaboratively building objects with and for external stakeholders extended students dialogical experiences, enriching their learning experience and opening up new professional ways of being. We suggest that the trialogic approach explored here expands on well-established dialogic education principles by incorporating artefacts as an important part of the learning process. Data indicate that the course design enriches dialogic exchange through both interaction with a range of interlocutors and the focus on building objects. Further, students’ tertiary education experience is enriched by involving companies. Industry collaboration means that key stakeholders can contribute to finding the right balance between theory and practice, develop the field and help lay the foundations for well-prepared graduates.

Notes 1 www.forumcommunity.net 2 “Plus Student” is a student with advanced digital skills level recognised within the course.

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Triangulating identity, groups and objects Schwarz, B. B. (2009). Argumentation and learning. In N. M. Mirza & A.-N.. Perret-Clermont (Eds.), Argumentation and Education (pp. 91–126). Boston, MA: Springer. Schwarz, B. B., & Baker, M. J. (2016). Dialogue, Argumentation and Education: History, Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press. Simon, S., Erduran, S., & Osborne, J. (2006). Learning to teach argumentation: Research and development in the science classroom. International Journal of Science Education, 28(2–3), 235–260. Staarman, J. K. (in this volume) Pedagogical link-making with digital technology in science classrooms: New perspectives on connected learning. In N. Mercer, R. Wegerif & L. Major (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education (pp. ??). Stahl, G. (2003). Meaning and interpretation in collaboration. In B. Wasson, S. Ludvigsen & U. Hoppe (Eds.), Designing for Change in Networked Learning Environments: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning (CSCL 2003) (pp. 523–532). Bergen: Kluwer. Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3): 387–420. Trede, F., Goodyear, P., Macfarlane, S., Markauskaite, L., McEwen, C., & Tayebjee, F. (2016). Enhancing workplace learning through mobile technology: barriers and opportunities to the use of mobile devices on placement in the healthcare and education fields. In L. E. Dyson, W. Ng & J. Fergusson (Eds.), Mobile Learning Futures–Sustaining Quality Research and Practice in Mobile Learning (pp. 250–260). Sydney. Proceedings of 15th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning, mLearn 2016, Sydney, Australia, October 24–26, 2016. Vianna, E., & Stetsenko, A. (2011). Connecting learning and identity development through a transformative activist stance: Application in adolescent development in a child welfare program. Human Development, 54(5), 313–338. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society (M. Cole,V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.) Oxford, England: Harvard University Press.(Original work published 1930). Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Original work published 1934.) Wegerif, R. (2001). Applying a dialogical model of reason in the classroom. In R. Joiner, D. Faulkner, D Miel & K. Littleton (Eds.), Rethinking Collaborative Learning (pp. 119–139) London: Free Association Press. Wegerif, R. (2007). Dialogic Education and Technology: Expanding the Space of Learning. New York: Springer. Wertsch, J. V. (2013). The role of abstract rationality in Vygotsky’s image of mind. In A. Tryphon & J.Vonèche (Ed.) Piaget Vygotsky (pp. 33–52). London, UK: Psychology Press.

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SECTION VI

Dialogic education in science and mathematics

DIALOGIC EDUCATION IN SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS Jaume Ametller

Research on dialogic teaching in science and maths education is rich in both quantity and diversity.The six chapters in this section present an overview of findings in this area and propose some challenges and future avenues for research. The common interest among all the contributions is to study the relation between the role of dialogic practices in formal education and students’ learning, but the focus and aims present significant differences. All the contributions agree that dialogic teaching approaches have been shown in the literature to be effective at improving learning. The learning being considered ranges from specific elements of the subject matter, for instance science practices, to more general cognitive skills, such as abstract reasoning, and in some cases research has shown transfer of learning to other contents and contexts. The research has also generated insights on what makes dialogic approaches successful and on how to foster dialogic education practice. An example of this can be found in the chapter by Webb and colleagues which gathers detailed elements of dialogic teaching which has been found to positively influence students’ learning. On the grounds of these positive results, the contributors to this section make a specific proposal to move forward the field addressing challenges connected: to better understanding the connection between dialogic education and learning; to strengthen the evidence of the positive learning results and increase the influence of dialogic education; and to extend dialogic teaching to changing educational contexts. I will briefly discuss now some of the implications of challenges identified by the contributors and the proposals to address them. Tan and Tang suggest extending the study of dialogic education to evolving contexts of science education. In the case of Tan and Tang the challenge is to address an integrated STEM education with the insights gained from addressing the learning of scientific practices through dialogic teaching. This might require deepening the understanding of the role of empirical data in the specific nature of scientific dialogic argumentation. To do so it might be useful to find research methodologies to consider materiality. The development of dialogic materialist methodologies for the study of educational contexts, to include material aspects of the interaction not just as the substrate of the empirical data but as a way of accounting for the embodiment of the interaction during dialogue (Jordan-Haladyn, 2014) should be useful not just in science context but, potentially, in any dialogic interaction where there are physical elements involved.

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Kleine Staarman and Ametller consider dialogic education in digital networked contexts. The influence of networked technology on dialogic education has been discussed in the literature (Wegerif, 2013) but there is still little research on how it affects dialogic education in schools. This will require, not only rethinking data collection to be able to go beyond the space and time of schooling but reconsidering what we understand by dialogue and dialogic by reframing Bakhtinian ideas in a context that changes significantly some of the fundamental ontologies of education. Two chapters make proposals to extend the influence of dialogic education (Resnick and Libertus, and Webb), based on improved research evidence and on a better understanding of the connection of dialogic teaching approaches and cognitive science, respectively. Their methodological proposals could certainly contribute to provide more weight to the research results supporting the improvement of learning when dialogic education approaches are used. The use of more robust data, for instance, is at the core of the results that Clarke and Chan present in their chapter, which allows them to connect social cognitive processes with different kinds of discussions. This should contribute to provide more cohesion to dialogic education as a field, but in order to do so a stronger methodological research should be accompanied with more vigorous discussion on the ontological aspects of this educational approach. Webb’s proposal of using dialogic education to promote the development of scientific minds in schools might be backed by results on learning scientific skills during instruction based on dialogic approaches but might also be at odds with some interpretations of what is dialogic and, hence, what might be the aims of a dialogic education. Is a scientific mind the only one that can be responsible for the problems facing the world now? Could we not defend too that a dialogic perspective would call for a more diverse situation that “implies the simultaneous existence of manifold possibilities” (Holquist, 2003, p. 181)? A quick look at the theoretical foundations of the contributions to this section shows that our field of research has grown, sharing some basic references but accepting a rather wide range of definitions of dialogic teaching. The field mostly shares a socio-cultural perspective that places language as an important tool in mediating the educational and cognitive processes. Most research also includes the need for interaction in classrooms and some degree of openness. One could argue that this might be enough, and, indeed, it has not stopped the field from making progress, as the chapters in this section show, but we risk dialogic education to become another title for active methodologies. Is there something to be gained by having a more specific stance on what we mean by dialogue and dialogic? Rupert Wegerif discussed at length this issue (2008), particularly the potential issues arising from trying to bring together the perspectives of Bakhtin and Vygotsky, however the core of his argument is still not addressed in much of the research that has been carried out afterwards. Other authors have made explicit reflections of what they understand by dialogic education (Alexander, 2006; Mercer & Littleton, 2007) which have been widely referenced. In my opinion there is no need for a monolithic definition; it is probably more useful to have different perspectives that can dialogically interact among themselves. However, the field would benefit from consistent ontological discussions and decisions, not just on the methodologies to be used but also on the aims that we want to achieve in dialogic education.

References Alexander, R. J. (2006). Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk.York: Dialogos. Holquist, M. (2003). Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge. Jordan-Haladyn, M. (2014). Dialogic Materialism: Bakhtin, Embodiment and Moving Image Art. Peter Lang Publishing Incorporated.

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Dialogic education in science and mathematics Mercer, N., & Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking: A Sociocultural Approach. London: Routledge. Wegerif, R. (2008). Dialogic or dialectic? The significance of ontological assumptions in research on educational dialogue. British Educational Research Journal, 34(3), 347–361. Wegerif, R. (2013). Dialogic: Education for the Internet Age. London: Routledge.

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36 THE DETAILS MATTER IN MATHEMATICS CLASSROOM DIALOGUE Noreen M. Webb, Megan L. Franke, Marsha Ing, Nicholas C. Johnson and Joy Zimmerman

Introduction Although interest in classroom dialogue dates back many decades (e.g., Cazden, John, & Hymnes, 1972), research on the kinds of classroom dialogic interaction that promote student learning has gathered speed in recent years (Resnick, Asterhan, & Clarke, 2015). Especially notable has been an increased focus on student participation in classroom dialogic interaction and how teachers can foster the kinds of student participation that help students learn. This chapter describes findings from a decade-long program of research in mathematics classrooms that show how attending to details—the mathematical details of student participation in dialogic interaction and teacher support of student participation, and the particular classroom participation settings in which conversations take place—is central for understanding productive dialogic interaction and how to promote it.

Student participation in dialogic interaction We study how student participation in classroom dialogic interaction supports elementary school students’ mathematical learning of content such as number sense, number operations, and algebraic and relational thinking (e.g.,Webb et al., 2017). A primary purpose of the interaction among students and between students and teacher in the classrooms observed is to enrich and extend students’ mathematical understanding. We focus on two ways in which student participation in dialogic interaction is enacted: students can explain their own thinking, and they can engage with others’ ideas. By participating in these ways, students can deepen their own mathematical understanding by learning from others and can help other students further develop their mathematical understanding. Explaining one’s own ideas and engaging with others’ ideas can benefit students’ learning through multiple mechanisms. Formulating and offering ideas to others, listening to others’ ideas, and being challenged by others encourage students to monitor their own thinking, rehearse information in their own minds, reorganize and clarify material for themselves, recognize misconceptions, fill in gaps in their understanding, make connections between new information and previously learned information, acquire new strategies and knowledge, reconcile conflicting 530

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viewpoints, and develop new perspectives (Bargh & Schul, 1980; Brown, Campione, Webber, & McGilly, 1992; Chi, 2000; Forman & Cazden, 1985; Roschelle, 1992; Whitebread, Bingham, Grau, Pino Pasternak, & Sangster, 2007). Students can also gain confidence and improved perceptions of their competence in mathematics (Boaler & Greeno, 2000; Gresalfi, 2009). Explaining one’s thinking and engaging with others’ ideas are at the heart of many researchers’ perspectives on productive classroom dialogue. They feature in Mercer’s “Exploratory Talk”, where everyone in the classroom offers the relevant information they have and engages critically but constructively with each other’s ideas (Mercer, Hennessy, & Warwick, 2017). In Barron’s (2000, 2003) “highly coordinated” interaction, students propose ideas for joint consideration and closely attend to and acknowledge each other’s ideas, repeat others’ suggestions, and elaborate on others’ proposals. This participation also underlies co-construction, a term often used for interaction in which students contribute different pieces of information and build upon others’ explanations to jointly create complete ideas or solutions (Forman & Kraker, 1985; Hatano, 1993; Hogan, Nastasi, & Pressley, 2000). Such interaction also characterizes transactive discussions or transactive dialogues (Berkowitz & Gibbs, 1985; Kruger, 1993; see also Goos, Galbraith, & Renshaw, 2002) in which participants operate on each other’s reasoning, either in conflict situations (disagreements) or in non-conflictual situations (e.g., jointly co-constructing solutions; Azmitia & Montgomery, 1993), high-level co-regulation (Volet, Summers, & Thurman, 2009), and shared regulation (Iiskala, Vaurus, Lehtinen, & Salonen, 2011; Roschelle & Teasley, 1995;Vaurus, Iiskala, Kinnunen, & Lehtinen, 2003). These ways of participating in dialogic interaction are also embedded in forms of dialogue described as dialogic argumentation, argumentative dialogue, or argumentative discourse (Asterhan & Schwarz, 2016; Kuhn & Crowell, 2011; Kuhn, Wang, & Li, 2011; Resnick, 2015). Often the goal is for students to choose between or reconcile a diversity of viewpoints held by members of their group (that is, come to consensus, Enyedy,Wischnia, & Franke, 2008).To reach this goal, individuals may work to justify or defend their own positions in the face of challenges from others and also work to critique and challenge others’ positions (Walton, 1989). When responding to scrutiny by others, individuals explain their own positions.They also engage with others’ ideas both in the process of justifying one’s own thinking in comparison to others’ ideas and when critiquing others’ ideas. While explaining one’s own ideas and engaging with others’ ideas are often interrelated, they do not necessarily appear in tandem. On the one hand, students may explain their own thinking in the process of challenging or building upon another student’s idea. On the other hand, students may explain their own thinking without engaging with others’ ideas, as in Barron’s (2003) observations of uncoordinated group interaction in which participants talk over others and ignore each other’s suggestions, or explain to each other in parallel (perhaps in response to teacher directives). The hypothesized benefits of explaining one’s own thinking and engaging with others’ ideas find support in empirical evidence (e.g., Brown & Palincsar, 1989; Chinn, O’Donnell, & Jinks, 2000; Howe et al., 2007; Nattiv, 1994; Saxe, Gearhart, Note, & Paduano, 1993; Slavin, 1987; Veenman, Denessen, van den Akker, & van der Rijt, 2005; Webb & Palincsar, 1996; Yackel, Cobb, Wood, Wheatley, & Merkel, 1990). For example, training students to provide elaborated descriptions of their own ideas and to engage with others’ ideas has positive effects on learning outcomes (e.g., Gillies, 2004; Howe & Tolmie, 2003; Mercer, Dawes, Wegerif, & Sams, 2004). Engaging in these behaviors (e.g., providing complex explanations, reasons elaborated with further evidence, or explanations integrating multiple concepts) is positively correlated with learning outcomes (e.g., Roscoe & Chi, 2008). Argumentative discussion among students who hold different viewpoints may also lead to conceptual gains (e.g., Felton, Garcia-Mila, & Gilabert, 2009; Schwarz, Neuman, & Biezuner, 2000). 531

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Supporting productive student dialogue Much previous research has described how teachers can support explaining of one’s own ideas and engaging with others’ ideas. Teachers can set ground rules for student participation that focus on these dialogue components, for example, guidelines for sharing all relevant information openly, providing reasons for ideas and opinions, listening to others attentively, carefully considering all suggestions, and constructively challenging ideas offered (Baines, Blatchford, & Kutnick, 2008; Mercer, Hennessy, & Warwick, 2017). Teachers can also establish norms for desired communication, such as expecting that students will probe and challenge each other’s thinking to be able to understand it better (Yackel, Cobb, & Wood, 1991). Several decades ago researchers showed how teachers can give students instruction in desired behaviors or assign them roles to play. Teachers can provide instruction and practice in behaviors such as explaining problem-solving strategies (instead of just giving the answer, Gillies & Ashman, 1998; Swing & Peterson, 1982; Webb & Farivar, 1999), asking other students specific high-level questions (Fantuzzo, Riggio, Connelly, & Dimeff, 1989; King, 1999), asking questions to monitor each other’s comprehension (Mevarech & Kramarski, 2003), engaging in specific summarizing and listening activities (Hythecker, Dansereau, & Rocklin, 1988; O’Donnell, 1999;Yager, Johnson, & Johnson, 1985), and justifying their answers (Coleman, 1998; Palincsar, Anderson, & David, 1993). Teachers can also embed activities into classroom lessons, such as assigning students to play certain roles when interacting with their peers—for example, the active listener who detects errors and omissions in other students’ summaries (O’Donnell & King, 1999) or the observer who monitors the frequency with which group members “explain by telling how” (Cohen, 1994) or requiring students to engage in specific behaviors—for example, asking each other high-level questions about the material to encourage students to elaborate their ideas (King, 1992) or responding to written prompts to encourage individuals to give justifications of their answers and beliefs (Coleman, 1998). Teachers’ ongoing interaction with students and in-the-moment support of student participation during the course of dialogic interaction in the classroom can also shape students’ explaining and engagement with others’ ideas. Promising teacher moves include asking students probing and clarifying questions to press them to elaborate on their ideas, asking students to paraphrase other students’ ideas, asking students for their opinions about other students’ ideas, and helping students confront discrepancies between their own thinking and others’ ideas (Chinn, Anderson, & Waggoner, 2001; Gillies, 2004, 2006; Gillies & Boyle, 2008; Kazemi & Stipek, 2001; Michaels, O’Connor, & Resnick, 2008; O’Connor & Michaels, 2017; O’Connor, Michaels, & Chapin, 2015; Smagorinsky & Fly, 1993; Waggoner, Chinn,Yi, & Anderson, 1995). Similar teacher moves, such as asking open-ended questions, pressing students to elaborate their reasoning, relating students’ contributions to each other, and prompting for alternative viewpoints (Asterhan, Schwarz, & Gil, 2011; Fishman et al., 2017), have been found to influence students’ quality of argumentation (e.g., giving complex reasoned arguments, offering extended explanations and supporting claims with evidence, building on each other’s ideas, challenging and critiquing others’ ideas).

Extending previous research Our work over the last decade shows that paying attention to the details of classroom dialogic interaction matters. We investigate 1) the nature of student participation in dialogic ­interaction—specifically, explaining one’s own thinking and engaging with others’ ideas—that is most predictive of student learning outcomes, and 2) the nature of teachers’ ongoing interaction 532

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with students—specifically in-the-moment engagement with students—that supports student participation. Certain kinds of explaining and engagement with others’ ideas are particularly predictive of students’ learning outcomes. Similarly, some kinds of teacher support for student participation in dialogic interaction may be more productive than others. As articulated as follows, it is important to focus on the mathematical details of the interaction (to determine, for example, whether students are giving complete explanations of their strategies for solving mathematical problems). A more recent finding is that it is also important to take into account the specific types of classroom participation settings in which dialogic interaction takes place—for example, whole-class discussions, small-group collaborative work, private conversations among students. Which classroom setting(s) are examined may influence conclusions about the nature of classroom dialogic interaction that takes place as well as inferences about interaction that is most predictive of student learning (Ing, Webb, Franke, Johnson, & Zimmerman, 2018). This chapter provides highlights from our program of work to show how the particulars of dialogic interaction, as well as the classroom participation settings in which interaction occurs, shape conclusions about productive dialogic interaction in the classroom.

The series of studies Over the course of the past decade, we have studied classrooms in multiple elementary schools in different urban areas in southern California, ranging from first to fifth grades (roughly ages six to ten) and a variety of ranges of student achievement levels and socio-economic status and teacher experience. Lessons focused on mathematical content such as multiplication and division, fractions, and relational thinking. Many teachers in these classrooms had participated in professional development activities related to Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) to help them attend to details of students’ mathematical thinking (Carpenter, Fennema, Franke, Empson, & Levi, 1999; Carpenter, Fennema, Peterson, Chiang, & Loef, 1989; Carpenter, Franke, & Levi, 2003; Jacobs, Franke, Carpenter, Levi, & Battey, 2007). Research on CGI shows that developing an understanding of children’s mathematical thinking impacts teacher practice and student learning (Carpenter, Fennema, & Franke 1996; Fennema & Franke, 1992 Fennema, Franke, Carpenter, & Carey, 1993; Fennema et al., 1996; Franke, Carpenter, Fennema, Ansell, & Behrend, 1998; Franke, Carpenter, Levi, & Fennema, 2001). We recorded interaction between teachers and students and among students (audio and video recording) and designed and administered mathematics assessments geared to the content of the lessons recorded. The mathematics assessments measured the sophistication and validity of students’ problem-solving strategies (Carpenter, Fennema, Franke, Levi, & Empson, 2015). In line with the CGI foundation undergirding this research, the coding of student participation in dialogic interaction and teacher support for student participation built in heightened sensitivity to the mathematical detail of the interactions. The distinctions we have made in terms of dialogic interaction are discussed in more detail as follows. Teachers used multiple settings for student participation. One setting was planned, largely student-led, small-group collaborative work (typically midway through the lesson) during which students were asked to solve problems together (usually in pairs but sometimes in groups as large as four students). Teachers gave instructions like the following for small-group work: “I want you to work on this with your partner. Make sure you try and understand each other’s strategies. Explain what you’re doing”. Teachers did not demonstrate a way of solving the problem that students were expected to use; rather, students were invited to solve the problem in any way of their choosing that made sense to them. An example problem in a third-grade classroom was “Ryan brought 6 packages of muffins for the writing celebration. If each package has 24 533

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muffins, how many muffins did Ryan bring?” Teachers circulated among the groups, spending varying amounts of time with groups, and groups worked independently from the teacher the rest of the time. This participation setting gave students the opportunity to generate multiple strategies for solving the assigned problems and to carry out lengthy, uninterrupted conversations about how to solve the problems. For the rest of the time, usually both before and after small-group collaborative work, teachers engaged the class in whole-class discussions. During whole-class discussion, the teacher engaged one or more students (or the class as a whole) in discussing strategies for solving problems. For example, it was common for the teacher to ask individual students or small groups to describe to the class their strategies for solving the problems assigned during collaborative group work. The teacher used the sharing of strategies to engage other students in the class in discussion of them. At multiple points during whole-class discussions, teachers directed students to carry out private student–student conversations to encourage students to share their ideas with each other and to discuss the ideas that other students shared with the class. These private conversations were typically brief (a couple of minutes) and were seamlessly connected with the whole-class discussion. For example, the teacher might ask students to “turn and talk to your partner” to share their ideas for solving a problem, then bring the class together in order for several students to describe their strategies to the class and, often, to engage the class in comparing and contrasting the strategies. Often, the teacher interspersed several opportunities for private conversation into the public sharing of a strategy by a student (or group of students). For example, during the course of a student sharing her strategy, the teacher may have stopped her at various points to ask students to engage with their partner privately about aspects of the strategy being shared: “Why did Mireia start off that way?”, “Where did she get the 20 from?”, “What do you predict Mireia will do next?”, “What is another way that Mireia could take apart the 24?”Teachers used these kinds of questions to stimulate private student conversations and then had students share their responses in the whole-class setting. For simplicity, although they are linked in the ways that teachers used them, we characterize whole-class discussion and the private student–student conversations that teachers initiated in the midst of whole-class discussion as distinct participation settings in what follows. Most classroom lessons observed included all three participation settings: whole-class discussions, impromptu private student–student “turn-and-talk” conversations, and small-group collaborative problem solving. The three participation settings offered somewhat different opportunities for students to participate. During whole-class discussion, typically one student spoke at a time and only a minority of students in the class participated extensively during any one lesson (e.g., sharing a strategy for solving a mathematics problem). During the small-group problem-solving setting, all students had the opportunity to discuss at length their own and others’ strategies for solving multiple problems. During the private turn-and-talk conversations that occurred in the midst of whole-class discussion, students had the opportunity to work with a partner on a small problem or portion of a task or to engage with a particular aspect of a strategy that had just been shared in the whole class. Our earlier coding and analysis of student participation in dialogic interaction focused on collaborative student-directed small-group work only or combined participation in collaborative work and whole-class discussion. It was only in the most recent study (Webb, Franke, Johnson, Ing, & Zimmerman, 2019) that we were able to reliably record and code the impromptu private student–student “turn-and-talk” conversations that occurred in the midst of whole-class discussion. The sections that follow take advantage of these new data to present findings about truly 534

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comprehensive measures of the interaction that occurred throughout all participation settings of the lesson and to explore the role of the participation setting in the relationship between student participation in dialogic interaction and learning.

Findings Student participation in dialogic interaction that predicts learning outcomes One set of findings emerging from our research concerns the nature of student participation in dialogic interaction that predicts learning outcomes. Our focus is on distinguishing student participation in terms of levels of detail (e.g., completely detailed explaining vs. partially detailed explaining). In our studies, the nature of the mathematical detail in student dialogic interaction—when explaining their own ideas and when engaging with the ideas of others— influenced the strength of the relationship with achievement. First, consistent with much previous research, giving detailed explanations (e.g., explanations that included many or most of the steps of their problem-solving strategies) was positively related to achievement outcomes. Importantly, however, whether explaining was complete and clear (the details provided made it clear what the student’s problem-solving strategy was) or was incomplete or unclear (the details were not sufficient to know exactly what the student’s thinking was; see Table 36.1 for examples) was even more predictive. Even after controlling for students’ previous achievement, students whose highest level of explaining was complete and clear showed higher posttest achievement than students whose highest level of explaining was incomplete or unclear (Ing et al., 2015; Webb et al., 2008, 2009, 2014, 2019). Second, also consistent with previous research, engaging with the details of others’ ideas was positively related to achievement. However, distinguishing whether students extended others’ ideas or repeated the details of others’ suggestions (e.g., rephrasing what others said, asking quesTable 36.1 Examples of students explaining their own ideas: two levels of detail Task: solve 4 × 52 mentally Description Fully detailed explaining

Partially detailed explaining

Example

Rationale

I started out by taking Articulates all parts of the solution strategy and makes clear how the 2s away and the 52 was decomposed and counting by 50. 50 combined 4 times separately, then four times. 50, 100, recombined. 150, 200. And then I add the 2s four times. And that’s how I got 208. You know how 4 times Provides some specific details related Explanation includes 5 is 20 and 2 times 4 to the strategy but does not fully some specific details equals 8 … explain strategy. In particular, about student explanation does not address how thinking but not 4 times 5 represents 4 times 5 tens full, complete, or and is 200, which determines how clear the two partial products will be used to complete the strategy. Full, complete, clear explanation of student thinking

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tions about particular details in students’ suggestions; see Table 36.2 for examples) was even more predictive. Even after controlling for prior achievement, students who added further detail to other students’ ideas in ways that extended the ideas (or provided alternatives) showed higher achievement than students who engaged with the details of others’ ideas but did not add to or extend those ideas (Ing et al., 2015; Webb et al., 2014, 2019). The results described here held regardless of the sophistication of students’ strategies being offered or discussed. It is through inspection of the mathematical details that the distinctions described previously become apparent. Explanations can be detailed yet at the same time leave ambiguities about the problem-solving strategy that the student used (compare the examples in Table 36.1). Similarly, students can engage with the details in other students’ ideas yet not add to or extend those ideas (compare the examples in Table 36.2). The value for student learning of participating at the higher level—completely explaining a problem-solving strategy and adding to others’ problem-solving ideas—lies in the work that the student does to attend to, and articulate, the central mathematical ideas in the strategies or mathematical concepts. For example, a student who initially has a partial or incomplete understanding about a fundamental mathematical idea must fill in those gaps in understanding to be able to articulate a complete explanation. Consider the second explanation in Table 36.1 (for solving 4 × 52); it was not unusual for students to understand that products involving the “tens” place and the “ones” place in 52 must both be considered, yet initially not know how to conceive of, or combine, the partial products (e.g., should 20 and 8 be added together? What do the 20 and the 8 represent? Should 200 be placed before 8 to make the numeral 2008?). Moving from such partial understanding to giving a complete explanation requires the student develop understanding of place value in relation to the multiplication problem, especially the conceptual distinction between 4 × 50 and 4 × 5. Although it was possible for students to contribute fully formed complete explanations without first contributing partial or incomplete ideas, this was rare in our observations. Table 36.2 Examples of students engaging with others’ ideas: two levels of detail Task: solve 6 × 21 mentally Description

Example

Adding details

Adding to, extending, or suggesting specific alternatives to another student’s idea or fully explaining another student’s idea

Referencing details

Repeating details in others’ ideas in some depth (but not fully explaining those ideas) or partially explaining others’ ideas without advancing the idea or suggesting alternatives

You know how [points to board] he got his answer for 21 times 3? It was 63, so he would just add another 63, and then he adds those together. He already put three 21s.

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Rationale Additional contribution references specific part of classmate’s strategy (21 × 3) and adds to it by doubling, then uses the new idea to complete the strategy.

Refers to specific details of classmate’s strategy (3, 21s), but does not suggest what or how to add to the three 21s.

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Providing complete explanations can help any student, regardless of mathematical strategy, work through their entire idea and make connections in ways that strengthen new and possible fragile understanding about the underlying mathematical ideas. It also provides a foundation for others (including the teacher) to suggest extensions of the ideas or different problem-solving approaches, which students can begin to incorporate into their own thinking. Among students who explain to some extent but never provide complete explanations, the same benefits might not accrue. These students may continue to have gaps in their knowledge and understanding. Moreover, providing incomplete explanations makes it difficult for others to recognize gaps in understanding, and so opportunities are reduced for having them addressed. Similar attention to central mathematical ideas is part of the distinction between levels of engaging with others’ ideas. Adding to others’ ideas likely involves extending one’s own thinking in ways that engaging with others’ ideas without extending them may not. Consider the first example in Table 36.2. The student generated a new strategy for solving the problem that neither that student nor any other student had yet articulated (recognizing that 6 × 21 can be separated into two groups of 3 × 21 and that the multiplication of 3 × 21 need only be done once and the resulting product doubled).

Taking into account different classroom participation settings Our analyses showed that which participation settings are the focus of observation and analysis has implications for conclusions about the nature and extent of student participation in dialogic interaction in the classroom. First, conclusions about the prevalence of student participation depended on the classroom participation setting (Webb et al., 2019). Figure 36.1 exhibits student participation in each setting. During small-group collaborative work, on average, each student exhibited complete explaining in 47% of lessons observed and added details to others’ ideas in 35% of lessons observed.The percentages were lower in whole-class discussion: 30% for explaining one’s own ideas and 15% for engaging with others’ ideas. Percentages were highest

Mean percentage of lessons per student

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Figure 36.1 Percentage of lessons in which each student (on average) exhibited high-level participation in dialogic interaction.

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during the private turn-and-talk conversations that occurred in the midst of whole-class discussion: each student, on average, exhibited complete explaining and added details to others’ ideas in more than half of the lessons (54% and 55%, respectively). These results show that restricting attention to only some participation settings would have underestimated the prevalence of student participation that occurred in these classrooms. Second, attending to all participation settings helped produce a more comprehensive picture of student participation at the individual student level. As an example, Figure 36.2 shows the distribution of participation for three students who all exhibited a high (and nearly identical) incidence of participation overall (all were in the top quartile). These students’ patterns of participation vary considerably: Sonia shows the most balanced pattern across settings; Sebastian exhibited more participation during turn-and-talk conversations than in the other settings; Giancarlo exhibited the least participation during small-group collaborative work and notably lower levels of engaging with others’ ideas than explaining his own ideas. Attending to only one participation setting would have produced limited, and misleading, conclusions about these students’ participation. A sole focus on small-group collaborative work would show Sonia to be a very active participant (top quartile), Sebastian to be about average, and Giancarlo to be in the bottom quartile. A sole focus on whole-class discussion, on the other hand, would show Giancarlo to be a very active participant (near the very top in the sample) and Sonia and Sebastian to be about average. Generating comprehensive, and valid, information about participation at the individual student level is not only important for research but could be valuable data for teachers to use in informing their instructional practices. We acknowledge that the differences reported here in dialogic interaction across the participation settings may be specific to the structure of the particular classrooms observed and teachers’ use of the structures. For classrooms structured in other ways (e.g., one participation setting such as whole-class instruction; multiple settings used in a different order), conclusions about when and the degree to which students participate might differ from those drawn here. Moreover, even in classrooms with participation settings similar to those observed here, the interaction that emerges will likely differ according to how teachers use the settings to create opportunities for student dialogue. Nonetheless, our results suggest that taking participation settings into account will be a useful approach for understanding the nature of dialogic interaction in classrooms.

Teacher support of student participation in dialogic interaction Mathematical details also figure strongly in the nature of teacher support that is most productive for student participation. We have found that the teacher support that is most productive for eliciting high-level student participation references specific mathematical details in what students say.That is, it is not sufficient for teachers to simply invite students to explain their own thinking about how to solve problems or to engage with others’ ideas. While general invitations sometimes elicited high-level interaction, teacher questions that were linked to the mathematical details were more effective, as is illustrated next. Teacher support of students explaining their own ideas. Teachers can increase the incidence of student explaining by asking students questions that reference the details of students’ strategies given in their initial explanations. Such probing questions were quite effective (and were often necessary) to push students to clarify ambiguous aspects of their explanations and to formulate more complete explanations (Franke et al., 2009). Teacher support of students engaging with others’ ideas. Teacher moves that focused on mathematical details in student participation also supported student engagement with others’ ideas. 538

Sonia

Percentage of lessons

100 80 60 40 20 0

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Sebastian

100 80 60 40 20 0

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Giancarlo

100 Percentage of lessons

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80 60 40 20 0

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Figure 36.2 Percentage of lessons in which the student exhibited high-level participation in dialogic interaction.

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The focus on mathematical detail most often occurred in the context of “follow-up” moves after the “initial invitations” to engage with others’ thinking. Initial invitations, such as asking students to compare their strategies to those their classmates generated, explain problem-solving strategies that other students used, ask questions of each other, and work together with other students to create a solution strategy (Franke et al., 2015), tended not to yield a high level of student engagement with others’ ideas. More productive was for the teacher to follow up with moves that explicitly mentioned mathematical details in the ideas that had been shared, such as asking probing questions that drew attention to the specific, central details in a student’s mathematical idea and encouraging others to engage with those particular details (“Can you explain why she [divided each whole] into five pieces?”). The excerpt that follows shows teacher support of student explaining and engaging with others’ ideas.The teacher invited one student (Carlos) to explain his thinking and asked other students specific questions to promote their engagement with Carlos’ idea. Most of the teacher’s questions referenced particular mathematical details in Carlos’ strategy (e.g., the 20 in his partitioning of 24 into 20 and 4).The teacher positioned students as competent to participate in the interaction, and many different students participated, also referencing specific details in Carlos’ explanation. Teacher:

Carlos next one (“Ryan brought 4 packages of muffins for the writing celebration. If each package has 15 muffins, how many muffins did Ryan bring?”) … Can you write 6 and 24. What does the 6 represent? Students: Packages. Teacher: What does the 24 represent? Students: Muffins! Teacher: Nice and loud. Carlos: First I put 20 times 6 equals 120. Kaya: How do you know you know 20 times 6 equals 120? Teacher: Great question, Kaya. Carlos: Cause I counted it. Teacher: So … Mireia: How did you count it? Teacher: Thank you, Mireia. Carlos: By 20’s. Students: Show us. / Yeah. Show us. / Can you show us? Carlos: 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120. Teacher: Does that make sense? I’m going to stop for a second. Look up there. If you know what he did to get 20, be ready to share. If you didn’t, what should you ask? Julisa: Where did you get 20? Teacher: So raise your hand if you do know where he got the 20 from. Raise your hand if you’re not sure? One of you who are not sure, what should you do? Julisa: Where did you get the 20 from? Carlos: I got it from the 24, but I splitted it. Teacher: Can you show us that? (pause) Now do you know? (to Julisa) Mira? Mira: Yes. Teacher: Mireia, why did he go “times 6”? Mireia: Cause he used 20 six times. Teacher: Because? Donatello: Because there are 6 packages. Teacher: Awesome. So, what is he going to do next? Turn and tell your partner. 540

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Teachers also referenced mathematical details in students’ ideas to prompt private dialogic interaction among students. Examples include directing students to discuss details in strategies being shared by others (“How do you think they got these two numbers 60 and 30?”), predict the next step in a student’s strategy ([After Mireia counted 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120] “What do you think she will do next?”), or suggest a different way to carry out a part of a strategy (“What other way could she divide it that would be more efficient?”; Webb et al., 2019).

Conclusions The findings from our decade-long program of research in mathematics classrooms show how attending to the mathematical details of both student participation in dialogic interaction and teacher support of student participation are important for understanding classroom interaction and for shaping conclusions about classroom dialogue that is productive for student learning. Our analyses show the centrality of the mathematical details of students’ ideas in how classroom interaction progressed. Students’ expression of the mathematical details of their ideas helped the teacher understand their ideas and gauge the scope of their understanding and determine what support might help a student (and others in the class) develop ideas further. Expression of mathematical details also provided opportunities for students to give and receive specific feedback about each other’s ideas (for example, challenges, questions, corrections, suggestions, confirmations, extensions), which, in turn, could lead to students clarifying, correcting, elaborating upon, and extending each other’s ideas. Attending to the mathematical details was essential for the teacher and students to understand whether students’ explanations of problemsolving strategies (and, correspondingly, students’ understanding) made sense, were complete or only partially formed, and whether students’ contributions were extensions of (or alternatives to) other students’ ideas or were repetition or rephrasing of others’ ideas without extending them. Thus, the mathematical details in the conversations unfolded in ways that were illuminating to the teacher, to other students, and to the students who authored the ideas. Our findings also show the importance of taking into account the mathematical details in conversations to understand the participation that is most productive for student learning. Students who developed complete and fully detailed explanations of their own ideas and who elaborated upon or extended other students’ ideas showed greater learning outcomes than students whose explanations were left ambiguous or partially formed and who engaged with others’ ideas but did not extend them. Similarly, teacher support that attended to particular mathematical details in students’ ideas was more likely to produce further clarification, development, and embellishment of those ideas, both on the part of the authors of those ideas and on the part of other students engaging with those ideas. Making the sorts of distinctions described here requires considerable attention to the mathematical details in conversations. Determining whether, for example, students are providing complete explanations of a problem-solving strategy rather than incomplete or partial explanations requires closer scrutiny to what students are saying than does determining whether students are explaining their strategy (without regard to completeness) rather than, say, providing only the answer to the problem. Similarly, determining whether students are extending others’ ideas or repeating them requires greater scrutiny of student dialogue than determining whether students are attending to others’ ideas or not. Similar attention is required for the distinctions in teacher support of student dialogue. Discerning whether a teacher is asking about, and making reference to, specific details in students’ ideas requires closer attention than ascertaining whether a teacher is asking students generally to explain their thinking or attend to others’ ideas. While norm-setting and general moves that teachers make are important, our results show that teachers 541

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need to go beyond them to attend to the details of students’ ideas and ask students to engage with those details. Two important attributes of the mathematical details in conversations should be highlighted. First, the mathematical details were embedded in ideas that students generated. They were not predetermined details that an external observer could pinpoint. Second, the mathematical details of students’ thinking and of teacher support for student dialogue unfolded as the idea was being discussed. Thus, it is imperative to follow conversations as they evolve, rather than focusing on individual statements outside the context of the conversation. Our findings also suggest the need to think carefully about generating useful proxies for mathematical detail for use by classroom observers. First, the mathematical detail communicated did not necessarily correspond to the volume of the communication (e.g., number of words or utterances). A student’s contribution or a teacher’s question could be mathematically substantively detailed without using many words, whereas a different contribution might entail a large volume of words while constituting little mathematics of substance. For example, an incomplete or ambiguous explanation could be much longer than a complete (and compact) explanation. Similarly, repeating the details of someone else’s idea could take much longer than contributing a crucial detail that extended the idea. Furthermore, given the natural ebb and flow of conversations, participants could communicate important mathematical points in the form of highly abbreviated or short-hand remarks when what was said previously made it unnecessary to embellish the remark. Second, the form of the communication did not provide a key to its mathematical import. For example, teachers’ initial requests for students to explain their thinking often did not produce as much student expression of detail as teachers’ follow-up requests for further elaboration. But even followup questions varied in effectiveness: requests from the teacher to explain a particular mathematical detail in a student’s suggestion were usually more productive (in terms of generating additional mathematical explanation) than were more generic teacher requests for a student to explain further.

Acknowledgment This research was supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the Academic Senate on Research, Los Angeles Division, University of California. The views expressed in this paper are the authors’ alone and do not reflect the views or policies of the funding agencies. We wish to thank Angela C. Turrou for her assistance on the project and the teachers who contributed their expertise to our research.

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37 THE ROLE OF DIALOGUE IN SCIENCE EPISTEMIC PRACTICES Aik-Ling Tan and Kok Sing Tang

Introduction Dialogue serves as a means by which the business of everyday transaction takes place. Through verbal exchanges between individuals, ideas, concepts, agreements and disagreements come into being. Teaching and learning are largely accomplished via verbal exchanges. Teachers and students interact with one another to exchange ideas, discuss alternatives, explore solutions to reach consensus. Resources such as language, hand gestures and written texts facilitate these interactions. As such, studying the dialogues that occur during teaching and learning events will illuminate the “consciousness of individuals” within the social setting of the classroom (Kubli, 2005). The theory of dialogue (Bakhtin, 1981), known as dialogism, was developed by Mikhail Bakhtin and when combined with Vygotsky’s (1962) idea of thought and language, provides a convincing frame to examine interactions in classrooms. The focus of dialogism allows us to make sense of speakers’ intentions and thoughts through analysing their utterances together with the context in which the utterances are made. This is the “consciousness of the individual” as described by Kubli (2005, p. 504). Dialogue is about engagement of individuals or groups within a social space using available communicative resources to encourage, facilitate and develop their abilities to critique and interpret with the aim of deepening understanding (Bound et al., 2017). For Bakhtin, expression and creation of meaning in dialogue is never complete, never closed and always oriented toward the future. Similarly, the fact that language is used as a tool to enable teachers and students to exchange ideas during interaction forms the fundamental basis for adopting a sociocultural perspective to examine classroom interactions since language systems are social and cultural artefacts. The role of dialogue in supporting science teaching and learning is well acknowledged within the science education research community (Kelly, 2007). Research in this area has over the years examined how dialogue was used by teachers to construct and maintain various types of activity in science classrooms and revealed the rules and dynamics involved in the teaching and learning of science (e.g., Lemke, 1990; Mortimer & Scott, 2003; Wells, 1999). Increasingly, there is recognition that dialogue is not only central to the teaching and learning process but also fundamental to the epistemological nature of science itself. Science is a discipline that aims to build knowledge about the world we live in. It is an enterprise that relies heavily on groups of individuals (scientists) engaged in the epistemic practices of hypothesising, experimentation, 547

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collecting and making sense of evidence and developing plausible explanations based on available evidence. These epistemic practices rely on consensus and agreements within the community of scientists to legitimatise knowledge and “have been developed through a historical process, including, for instance, conferences which have institutionalised certain language or conceptual systems in order to facilitate further discussions” (Kubli, p. 523). Science learning in schools mimics the way scientists work to recover the knowledge that scientists discover. In order to understand science and how science can be learnt, it is logical to focus on (1) the context in which ideas are generated, (2) the way in which ideas are represented and communicated between individuals and the community and (3) the role of language in describing the concepts in science. In this chapter, we review several empirical studies in science education that focus on dialogue in questioning, inquiry, argumentation and legitimising conceptual knowledge. The purpose of this review is to find out how science education researchers have examined the relationship between dialogue and science epistemic practices as well as the conclusions they have drawn from the various methods employed in their studies. From the review, we aim to answer in this chapter “What is the unique function and role of dialogue in learning science epistemic practices?”

Theoretical justification Role of dialogue in science learning Vygotsky (1981) argues that language plays a key role, providing the means both for coordinating action and for thinking together. It is generally believed that language is derived from social context rather than having a basic unchanging nature. As such dialogic representations are necessary not only to support forms of collaborative interactions, they are necessary for the production of cultural artefacts, many of which are largely socially constituted (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005). Indeed, as Lave and Wenger (1991) proposed, language is the “tool of tools” that is needful for development of the individuals’ abilities to participate effectively both as members of their communities and simultaneously in the development of those communities through their members’ participation. In the sense-making process, language can manifest itself in a monologic or dialogic manner. Lotman (1988) explained the role of monologic discourse “to convey meanings adequately” (p. 34). As such, monologic function is important for passing on cultural meanings, “providing a common memory for the group” (p. 35), to facilitate the preservation of continuity and stability of beliefs and values within a culture. Monologic function is hence, by nature, authoritative, not open to question or alternative perspectives. In this transmissionary model of communication, although intersubjectivity is assumed, it cannot be guaranteed, because there is no opportunity for misunderstandings or misinterpretations by the receiver(s) to be corrected. Even with this limitation of monologic interaction, there is still a role for monologic interactions and direct instruction in school (Wells, 1993) to enable teachers to “pass on” fundamental knowledge and instructions to students. But monologic instruction alone is limiting. Students need to be given opportunities to engage in clarifying dialogue to reach desired intersubjectivity. Opportunities and space for explorations and dialogic interactions are hence necessary. Explorations of classrooms by researchers typically focus on the sequential organisation of the discourse and of the functions that teachers’ and students’ utterances performed in the coconstruction of meaning (Wells & Arausz, 2006). In understanding dialogic interactions in the classroom, research has typically emphasised the third move of triadic dialogue to take account 548

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of various different ways in which a teacher might follow up on a students’ answer to a teacher’s initiating question (Wells, 1993). Wells and Arausz (2006) found that interaction became more dialogic when the class was engaged in activities such as planning, interpreting or reviewing student inquiries. The researchers also found low frequencies of “true” discussion. They found dialogic interactions that were teacher-led enabled participants to systematically explore an issue and work toward some form of conclusion. Adopting an exploratory orientation does make dialogue more likely to occur. It was concluded that the single most important action a teacher could take to shift the interaction from monologic to dialogic is to ask questions to which there were multiple possible answers and encourage the students who wish to answer to respond to, and build upon, each other’s contributions. It is commonly assumed that students are more interested in learning when they actively participate in the learning process and know that their contributions are able to influence the final outcome of the problem-solving process. However, in science, students are involved in learning more abstract and impersonal concepts where they have less control over the final knowledge that is crafted. As such, Wells and Arausz, (2006) suggested that dialogic interactions be orchestrated such that the students are “invested in the outcome of the discourse and, second, that the outcome is not predetermined in advance” (p. 415). Along the same vein of how dialogue in the science classroom can be promoted to sustain students’ interest in learning science, Bereiter (1994) suggested the construct of “progressive discourse”. From his research, progressive discourse supports science learning as it encourages participants to be willing to revise their own ideas and conceptions as they consider the ideas, proposals and arguments by others with whom they interact. The resultant understanding created from discussions and dialogic interactions is likely to be superior in terms of complexity of logic and accuracy when compared with initial ideas the individual students had at first. As such, dialogic interactions in classrooms are appropriate for learning of fundamental science concepts that need not necessarily be controversial in nature. The progress in knowledge from students’ everyday understanding to a change in conceptual understanding upon being exposed to scientific evidence and reasoning reflects a characteristic of science epistemic practice as scientific knowledge “is created through dialogue between alternative points of view, supported by arguments from evidence, and subject to revision in the light of further evidence” (Wells & Arausz, 2006, p. 417). Given that dialogue provides a platform for science ideas to be discussed openly and critically, science teachers can seize occasions that spontaneously arise to encourage students to express alternative points of view, to learn how to provide supporting arguments for their own perspective and to listen respectfully to, and attempt to understand, the perspectives and arguments of others. As such, the development of skills related to dialogue is as important for science learning as learning the content of science.

Epistemic practices of science Science is a way of knowing the world around us that relies heavily on curiosity, theories, laws and empirical evidence. Some of the activities that scientists are involved in include raising questions about the world around us, conducting investigations to gather data, connecting the data to plausible explanations and building a strong argument to convince peers that the evidence and explanations are valid.To make sense of data, transform them into evidence and to link evidence to explanations, scientists make inferences. All inferences in science hold true on condition that the laws of nature are constant and are applied the same way to all matter across time and space. This Uniformity of Nature Principle assumption applies to all scientific knowledge (Wenning, 2009). According to Wenning (2009), the inferential process to craft scientific knowledge can either take the stance of rationalism, reliabilism, coherentism or empiricism. Regardless of the 549

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stance taken, it is clear that scientists engage in some form of discussion and justification to convince the scientific community that the relationship between specific pieces of evidence and explanations are valid. To enculture science learners with the practices of scientists, students can be exposed to the epistemic practices of questioning, inquiry, argumentation and legitimising conceptual knowledge. According to Kelly and Licona (2018, p. 140), “epistemic practices are the socially organised and interactionally accomplished ways that members of a group propose, communicate, evaluate, and legitimise knowledge claims”. Each of the epistemic practices in science (questioning, inquiry, argumentation, legitimising conceptual knowledge) requires the use of discourses, whether spoken, written or symbolic. Discourse refers to the language used and includes both verbal and non-verbal communications and the use of signs and symbols. The reliance on language in the knowledge construction process implies a need to examine language use in classrooms in order to understand how scientific knowledge is communicated, taught and learnt. It is important to point out that the boundaries of these four epistemic practices are not distinct as scientific practices are in reality messy in nature (Mody, 2015). Thus, summarising the range of epistemic practices in science in terms of questioning, inquiry, argumentation and legitimising conceptual knowledge is a simplification of the field. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this chapter, the discussion and organisation in terms of these four epistemic practices provide a useful way to highlight the role of dialogue across a range of characteristic activities of how scientists conduct their work. The four practices are also a reflection of the literature in how science education researchers have positioned their work in the research topics of questioning, inquiry, argumentation and legitimising conceptual knowledge.

Review of studies involving dialogue and science epistemic practices Questioning The process of building scientific knowledge typically begins with a question. In the investigation of natural phenomena, scientists raise questions about how and why things work. These questions form the basis for the design of experiments, data to be collected and interpretation and discussion of evidence. Since questions form the core of science epistemic practice, they should also form the stem of the science learning process (Chin & Osborne, 2008). Research in the role of dialogue on questioning generally falls into two categories focusing on either teacher questioning or student questioning. Both are necessary as instructional supports to help students learn how to ask and make sense of scientific questions. For teacher questioning, many studies look into the interaction pattern between teachers and students, given that what is a question must be contextualised to an interaction exchange or adjacency pair (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973). A common observation from almost every study was the limited IRE (Initiate–Response–Evaluate) exchange that framed the way most teachers ask questions (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). To promote science learning, many researchers have looked for ways to modify the IRE structure to make classroom talk more engaging and dialogic (e.g., Mortimer & Scott, 2003; Roth, 1996;Wells, 1999). In the context of science classroom talk, Mortimer and Scott (2003) made a distinction between dialogic talk that is opened to multiple points of view (heteroglossic voices; Bakhtin, 1981) and authoritative talk that is confined to one hegemonic point of view. An IRE exchange, even though it involves two or more people in the conversation, is a form of authoritative (or monologic) talk because the teacher is only eliciting and evaluating a narrow range of answers from a scientific perspective. A dialogic talk, by contrast, involves a wider range of perspectives, not necessarily aligned with an authoritative (i.e., scientific) point of view. 550

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A key to dialogic talk is for teachers to ask more open-ended questions and make the last move in the IRE triadic exchange less evaluative and more of an extended “follow up” (F), thus turning the interaction into what Mortimer and Scott (2003) call an I-R-F-R-F chain of questioning. Along this line of research, science teachers are encouraged to use various discursive strategies, such as Socrative questioning (Hogan & Pressley, 1997), reflective toss (van Zee & Minstrell, 1997), revoicing (O’Connor & Michaels, 1993), constructive challenge (Chin, 2006) and meta-discoursing (Rappa & Tang, 2018) to help students consider alternative views in their discussions and thinking. These dialogic characteristics are an important part of scientific questioning that are exemplified through effective teacher questioning. While teacher questioning, particularly of a dialogic nature, provides a model for students to learn how to ask good scientific questions, student questioning is also crucial for meaningful learning and inquiry (Chin & Osborne, 2008).The ability of students to pose appropriate scientifically oriented questions to guide their thinking and discussions with others is an important skill to acquire (Kuhn, 2009). In the science learning process, students should be able to work with others to ask questions that would help them become aware of what they do not understand, compare the strengths and weaknesses of competing ideas, recognise any inconsistency or faulty reasoning, formulate and test hypotheses, evaluate the evidence that supports or refutes the hypotheses, and generate alternative explanations or ideas that are more viable. (Chin & Osborne, 2010, p. 235) Such student-to-student questioning in small group discussions is one of the defining features of what Mercer, Dawes, Wegerif, and Sams (2004) call Exploratory talk as it mirrors the ways of reasoning among scientists.

Inquiry Science inquiry generally refers to the activities and processes scientists engage in to study the natural world through experimentation and negotiation of meanings from their observation or experimentation (Crawford, 2000). Contrary to the popular myth of a solitary scientist working alone, in reality, collaboration is the norm in science inquiry as scientists typically work in teams and operate within a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In this sense, the scientific study of the world is inseparable from the networking and consensus-building activities among scientists (Latour, 1987). Therefore, to be involved in science inquiry requires a participatory and interactional process that occurs through the negotiation of the sociocultural practices in scientific communities (Lemke, 2001). Two major strands of research are carried out in science education with respect to science inquiry and dialogic instruction.The first strand focuses on what is uttered in class to understand the learning of science content through engagement in science investigations and exhibitions (e.g., Ash, 2003; Moje, Collazo, Carrillo, & Marx, 2001; Tang & Putra, 2018). For instance, in Kaartinen and Kumpulainen’s (2002) study which focused on collaborative inquiry in chemistry learning, they examined the discourse and content learning involved in a group investigation task. With the view that the key elements of collaborative inquiry included experimentation, social negotiation and explanation-building, they developed an analytical tool for highlighting processes of explanation-building in collaborative inquiry, focusing on four parallel analytic frames, namely discourse moves, logical processes, nature of explanation and cognitive strategies. 551

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Analysis of the discourse moves in the students’ discussions revealed six conceptual themes related to the learning of solubility. Each conceptual theme usually started from the initiation move and led to several conversational moves in the form of continuing or extending the discussion. Complex topics and explanations that occurred within one conceptual theme often took several conversational turns to build up. Kaartinen and Kumpulainen’s (2002, p. 208) study suggests that collaborative inquiry requires several dialogic processes in order for negotiation of various perspectives, interpretations and attitudes to take place. Recognising the important role of language competencies in enabling students to participate in science inquiry processes, the second strand of research focuses on strategies that foreground the learning of English language for science learning, particularly for students from diverse language backgrounds. Fradd and Lee (1999) argued for the need to look at science inquiry from a language and cultural perspective in the sense of recognising that the dialogue in languagediverse science classrooms typically involves elements of different students’ family and cultural backgrounds. There is value therefore in examining the emergence and roles of these different dialogic interactions to enable more meaningful science inquiry processes, such as raising questions, crafting explanations and communicating ideas. Based on this premise, a number of studies integrated specific literacy instruction (e.g., text-based investigations, read-alouds) to complement the hands-on investigations required in science inquiry lessons. For instance, a class of fourth-grade English language learners (ELLs) in Haneda and Wells’s (2010) project was involved in a science project that built their understanding of the physics of motion and the inquiry skills involved in the project. A key feature in their approach was the use of writing and reading of science journals to enrich the ELLs’ discussion of their practical investigations. The study shows that engagement with science ideas through multimodal connections across action, talk and text is an important consideration when designing science inquiry lessons for diverse language learners.

Argumentation In justifying and connecting claims to scientific evidence, scientists engage in argumentation. By argumentation, we refer to the “verbal, social, and rational activity aimed at convincing a reasonable critic of the acceptability of a standpoint by putting forward a constellation of propositions justifying or refuting the proposition expressed in the standpoint” (van Emerson & Grootendorst, 2004, p. 1). As such, argumentation always involves a dialogic event between two or more individuals. Scientific argumentation, however, is a special case where the dialogue also involves the coordination between theory and empirical evidence to put forward a claim, prediction or explanation (Duschl & Osborne, 2002). Historical and sociological studies of science have shown that the development of science frequently occurs through dispute and debate around competing theories that provide explanations of natural phenomena (Kuhn, 1962; Latour, 1987). In learning this epistemic practice of science, students need to learn argumentation as a form of discourse through a range of explicit instruction, modelling and pedagogical activities (Erduran, Simon & Osborne, 2004). There has been a number of approaches taken by researchers in this area. One common approach focuses on the language structure of an argument based on Toulmin’s (1958) model of argument (Cavagnetto, 2010). Studies that adopt this approach reported on students learning the claim–evidence–reasoning structure of an argumentative discourse and applying it to generate explanations of a phenomenon as well as evaluate competing explanations (Erduran et al., 2004; Pimentel & McNeill, 2013; Sampson & Clark, 2008). For instance, in Erduran et al.’s (2004) project, the researchers collaborated with science teachers to 552

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develop argumentation lessons as part of their instruction. A key emphasis in the study was the development of a tool based on Toulmin’s argument pattern to trace the quality of argumentation in the analysis of discourse from whole-class and small-group discussions among secondary school students. They maintained that since scientific argumentation engages learners in a dialogical conversation based on claims and rebuttals, the presence of rebuttals can be treated as a measure of sustained engagement in argumentation discourse. On this basis, they examined transcripts of talk from 43 discussion groups in 23 lessons to identify episodes of opposition and dialogical argument and found an increase in the level of argumentation over two years. A different approach to argumentation focuses on the dialogical relations between two interlocutors instead of examining the language structure of an argument (Ford & Forman, 2006). This approach emphasises the process of argumentation at a collective level rather than the product of argumentation achieved by an individual. Based on Bakhtin’s (1981) view that there are always different ideas confronting each other in a dialogue, Roth (2013) asserts that argumentation does not belong to individuals but is inherently a collective phenomenon that emerges in and through the relations between speaker and hearer. In an analysis of two children talking about their ideas as they observed an experiment, Kim and Roth (2014) show how the conversational turn pair between both speakers must be considered as the minimum analytic unit for argumentation to take place. As Kim and Roth (2014, p. 4) put it, “A claim becomes a claim only when it is stated and responded to by the recipient”. Importantly, it is the turn pair that drives the interplay of contradiction and resolution which simultaneously moves the conversation ahead as well as leading to the development and progression of ideas.

Legitimising conceptual knowledge The process of legitimising conceptual knowledge in science is often perceived to be the end goal of scientific pursuit, which is to build a coherent and rational understanding of the world we live in. Experiments are set up, data are collected and analysed, explanations are crafted and reports are generated with the purpose of generating a body of scientific knowledge to inform the community. According to Foucault’s (1972) analysis, the body of scientific knowledge comprises the formation of an apparatus of concepts, which emerge as a set of rules for determining what are meaningful statements within a discipline. Thus, what is a concept in any discipline is dependent on a “discursive formation” that is derived from all the talk spoken by members of a discourse community, rather than a mental concept that resides in the mind or consciousness of an individual (Foucault, 1972). Just as the pursuit of science has been the development of scientific knowledge, the goal of science learning has been for a long time the development of conceptual understanding, with the assumption that scientific knowledge development in individuals mirrors the complex process of theory change in the history of science (Posner et al., 1982). Traditionally, research in conceptual understanding in science is dominated by the notion of conceptual change which is marked by a change of an individual’s understanding from a naïve mental view (or misconception) to a scientifically accepted view. However, there has been a gradual shift from this perspective to a social and discursive view, beginning with a study from Roschelle (1992) who applied conversational analysis and pragmatics to examine how “convergent” conceptual change between two physics students was achieved through their collaborative discourse. Another study by Duit, Roth, Komorek, and Withers (1998) combined conceptual change research with a discourse analysis perspective. Based on the view of “language as a form of highly flexible situated action rather than a window onto individuals’ underlying cognitive representations that are expressed in talk” (Duit et al., 1998, p. 1061), they conducted a microanalysis of how a group of 553

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students participated in a particular “language game” of integrating talk and concepts to understand a natural phenomenon. The relationship between classroom talk and the process of legitimising conceptual knowledge is further illuminated by studies that use a linguistic analysis on discourse. A common approach is the application of Halliday’s (1978) systemic functional linguistic (SFL) to understand how students learn science content through classroom discourse (e.g., Fang, 2005; Lemke, 1990; Seah, Clarke & Hart, 2011). Based on this perspective, Lemke (1990) analysed the content of science in classroom talk from the semantic relationships among the uttered words made by the teachers and students. He found that talking science consists of “an actual pattern of meaningful action, using semiotic resources, that is repeatedly performed and recognised in a community; a formation is a sort of ‘institutionalised’ way of talking, or gesturing, or behaving” (Lemke, 1990, p. 194). In other words, what science educators often call a “concept” is really a construct for a canonical and recognisable assemblage of semantic relationships of texts according to the discourse practices of the scientific community. While there are certainly unique ways in which individuals think and talk about a particular concept, every utterance and action largely conform to repeatable social patterns that are more or less the same across different settings within the educational community. In more recent years, several studies have extended science classroom talk to include other multimodal resources that are frequently drawn upon to make scientific meanings in the classrooms (e.g., Givry & Roth, 2006; Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn, & Tsatsarelis, 2001; Lemke, 1998; Tang, Tan & Yeo, 2011). After all, scientific concepts are seldom composed of a single mode of representation but are “semiotic hybrids that are simultaneously verbal, mathematical, visual-graphical, and actional-operational” (Lemke, 1998, p. 87). Based on this view, Tang and colleagues (2011) used a multimodal discourse analysis to examine how a group of high school students understand the concept of energy through their collaborative talk and found that their meaning-making of the concept can only be achieved through a particular way of combining words, symbols, images and gestures. Similarly, based on an interaction analysis of students’ talk and gestures, Givry and Roth (2006) proposed a redefinition of the nature of conception to consist of a dialectical unit that includes all semiotic resources (e.g., talk, gesture, setting) that are made available to a speaker.

Discussion Based on the review, we can make a number of inferences concerning the role of dialogue in learning science epistemic practices. We discuss the implications in terms of the conceptual, methodological and pedagogical issues related to the role of dialogue. Conceptually, the studies provide evidence of dialogue as an integral component of science epistemic practices as well as illustrate the mechanics of dialogue through which scientific knowledge is proposed, communicated, evaluated and legitimised (Kelly & Lincona, 2018). The heteroglossic and intertextual nature of dialogue, the joint interactions enabled by dialogue and the semiotics of language and representations mediated through dialogue all form the fundamental basis on which all the four epistemic practices are enacted. In this sense, scientific questioning, inquiry, argumentation and legitimatising conceptual knowledge are essentially dialogic events between two or more individuals within the scientific community. In addition, each epistemic practice has a specific requirement that touches on the affordance of dialogue. For questioning, the context of a question is dependent on the interaction exchange in which it is embedded. Conversely, the authoritativeness or dialogic nature of the exchange rests on the close- or open-endedness of the question, both of which are necessary 554

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for the process of building scientific knowledge (Mortimer & Scott, 2003). For inquiry, dialogic processes are necessary for the social negotiation of perspectives, interpretations and attitudes in order to build robust explanations arising from observation or experimentation. Furthermore, the explanations are proposed in a social space through dialogue where critique and dispute of competitive theories could take place, which is the essence of scientific argumentation. Critique is also an important form of knowledge evaluation and legitimatisation of knowledge against the backdrop of normative knowledge agreed upon by scientists. Finally, the knowledge constructed by scientists is institutionalised and added to the conceptual canons of science through a discursive formation (Foucault, 1972) of repeated and recognisable ways of talking and acting by scientists who operate within their discourse communities. Methodologically, the studies we reviewed also show how the epistemic practices of science can be analysed through a dialogic lens. First, it was evident that the analysis of epistemic practices cannot be separated from the dialogue in which they are embedded. For instance, what is regarded as a question or claim can only be determined by a response in a turn-taking adjacency pair. As such, the conversational turn pair between two speakers or voices in a dialogue must be considered as the minimum analytic unit for the analysis of questioning and argumentation (Kim & Roth, 2014). The analysis of dialogue is not limited to interactions (e.g., discourse moves, turn-taking) but also includes meaning-making elements that are determined by the semantic and intertextual relationships of the words uttered in the dialogue (Lemke, 1990). While research in the dialogue of science education has emphasised the importance of oral discourse, there are increasingly more studies that include and foreground other modes of representation, particularly gestures and images, that are equally central to science epistemic practices. The attention to multimodal resources in the role of dialogue represents the forefront of current research in science education. In terms of the pedagogical implications, as the role of dialogue is fundamental to the epistemic practices of the scientific community, the attention to dialogue in the science classroom will facilitate student learning of science. For example, the discursive features of teacher and student questioning are essential bases for the type of dialogic and exploratory talk to take place, which are necessary for students to develop critical thinking and deep understanding in science (Chin & Osborne, 2008; Mercer et al., 2004). Dialogic interaction also enables meaningful science inquiry processes that involve experimentation and collaboration. Engagement with science ideas through this process has shown to be beneficial for science students, especially for students from diverse language backgrounds (e.g., Haneda & Wells, 2010). In making scientific claims, the learning of argumentation is best taught and practiced as a form of dialogue between two persons having diverging results or interpretations. Instructional tasks that promote such dialogue around competing theories and alternative explanations aid students to not only improve their argumentation skills but also gain a deeper conceptual understanding in science (e.g., Erduran et al., 2004).

The way forward The role of dialogue as discussed in current science education literature is central to students’ ability to engage in the epistemic practices of science.As one of the discipline goals of science is the ongoing pursuit to understand and construct models to represent the natural world, new vocabularies, along with new ways of thinking and communication, would continue to evolve in sync with new discoveries. The epistemic practices of questioning, inquiry, argumentation and legitimising conceptual knowledge provide the normative practices on which new understandings of the natural world are built.To better appreciate the effects of new discoveries and scientific knowledge on the 555

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communicative demands of learners, in-depth analysis of classroom talk and interactions can be carried out in learning situations from classical scientific knowledge (for example Newton’s Laws) to more contemporary and modern knowledge (for example quantum physics). As learning moves towards a more integrated form, the call for science learning to take a cross-disciplinary and integrated approach has become louder. The progress towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education appears inevitable. With an integrated approach, hybrid epistemic practices adopting characteristics of the different domains would result. For instance, beyond learning scientific concepts, the role of dialogue in STEM classrooms would also extend to sense-making and decision-making in socioscientific issues. The penetration of science into our everyday lives demands that learners of science be scientifically literate to be informed consumers of science to participate in a democracy. The epistemic focus of socioscientific issues requires learners to be engaged in understanding multiple perspectives including moral, religious and personal ones in the construction of a coherent reasoning to support a specific position relating to controversial issues (Kelly & Licona, 2018). In applying scientific knowledge to make sense of complex socioscientific issues, dialogue forms the fundamental means in enabling persuasion during argumentation. Coherent lines of arguments in proposing solutions to socioscientific issues can only be achieved through the use of scientific vocabularies, knowledge and inquiry process. This implies that generic everyday discourse is limited in the scientific sense-making process. Consequently, it is needful for pedagogical practices in science to explicitly include ways to enable learners to engage in formulating productive discussions, since “conceptual, epistemic, and social goals all entail the use of discourses (spoken, written, symbolic) and pose communicative demands of students” (Kelly & Licona, 2018, p. 5). In the same vein, the inclusion of engineering thinking in STEM education demands that learners be engaged in understanding the concepts of optimisation of systems and be involved in the crafting of criteria to evaluate success of systems. These engineering epistemic practices, when amalgamated with conceptual knowledge and models in science learning, would require and result in different ways of dialoguing and interaction in the classrooms. Of importance and interest would be for researchers to empirically examine the similarities and differences in dialogic interactions in science and STEM classrooms to enable greater clarity on the two forms of learning.

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Aik-Ling Tan and Kok Sing Tang Pimentel, D. S., & McNeill, K. L. (2013). Conducting talk in secondary science classrooms: Investigating instructional moves and teachers’ beliefs. Science Education, 97(3), 367–394. Posner, G. J., Strike, K. A., Hewson, P. W., & Gertzog, W. A. (1982). Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education, 66(2), 211–227. Rappa, N. A., & Tang, K.-S. (2018). Integrating disciplinary-specific genre structure in discourse strategies to support disciplinary literacy. Linguistics and Education, 43, 1–12. Roschelle, J. (1992). Learning by collaborating: Convergent conceptual change. Journal of Learning Sciences, 2(3), 235–276. Roth, M.-W. (1996). Teacher questioning in an open-inquiry learning environment: Interactions of context, content, and student responses. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 33(7), 709–736. Roth, W.-M. (2013). An integrated theory of thinking and speaking that draws on Vygotsky and Bakhtin/ Vološinov, 1. doi:10.5195/dpj.2013.20 Sampson,V., & Clark, D. B. (2008). Assessment of the ways students generate arguments in science education: Current perspectives and recommendations for future directions. Science Education, 92, 447–472. Schegloff, E. A., & Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 8(4), 289–327. Seah, L. H., Clarke, D. J., & Hart, C. E. (2011). Understanding students’ language use about expansion through analyzing their lexicogrammatical resources. Science Education, 95(5), 852–876. Sinclair, J., & Coulthard, M. (1975). Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English Used by Teachers and Pupils. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tang, K. S., & Putra, G. B. S. (2018). Infusing literacy into an inquiry instructional model to support students’ construction of scientific explanations. In K. S. Tang & K. Danielsson (Eds.), Global Developments in Literacy Research for Science Education (pp. 281–300). Cham: Springer. Tang, K. S., Tan, S. C., & Yeo, J. (2011). Students’ multimodal construction of work-energy concepts. International Journal of Science Education, 33, 1775–1804. Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28, 675–735. Toulmin, S. E. (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Emerson, F. H., & Grootendorst, R. (2004). A Systematic Theory of Argumentation: The Pragma-Dialectic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Zee, E. H., & Minstrell, J. (1997). Reflective discourse: Developing shared understandings in a physics classroom. International Journal of Science Education, 19(2), 209–228. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1981). The instrumental method of psychology. Wertsch, J.V. (Ed), The concept of activity in Soviet psychology. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Wells, G. (1993). Reevaluating the IRF sequence: A proposal for the articulation of theories of activity and discourse for the analysis of teaching and learning in the classroom. Linguistics and Education, 5, 1–37. Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic Inquiry: Towards a Sociocultural Practice and Theory of Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wells, G., & Arauz, R. M. (2006). Dialogue in the classroom. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 15(3). 379–428. Wenning, C. J. (2009). Scientific epistemology: How scientists know what they know. Journal of Physics Teacher Education Online, 5(2), 3–15.

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38 THE FUTURE OF DIALOGIC EDUCATION An opportunity and a challenge Lauren B. Resnick, Melissa E. Libertus and Faith Schantz

The field of research on the role of dialogue in learning and instruction is reaching a new phase. We now know that students who participate in structured argumentation and discussion with their classmates can make surprising, even stunning, learning gains. A growing number of research studies show that relatively short engagement in dialogic learning can produce strong and lasting effects on student knowledge in the major domains, as measured by examinations and other assessments. To take just a few examples, students in England who talked their way through puzzling science problems scored higher than their peers on the General Certificate of Secondary Education exams—not only in science, but also in English and maths (Adey & Shayer, 1990; Adey & Shayer, 2015). In the Eastern US, students who participated in discussion-rich maths classes far outscored other students on the state test, in English as well as maths (O’Connor, Michaels, & Chapin, 2015; Chapin & O’Connor, 2012). Students from the American Midwest who engaged with a science/public policy issue through discussion and debate used more academic vocabulary during their classroom conversations and during an interview about a different topic, compared to students who were taught the same material through direct instruction (Ma et al., 2017). Studies of these kinds—which continue to appear in respected, blind-reviewed journals— involve carefully designed, complex interventions. Many of them, however, describe isolated, short-term programmes with small groups of students and teacher volunteers.1 We have not yet assembled the kind of evidence we need to convince policy makers, parents, or even educators that all students can potentially benefit from dialogic teaching, in every domain. We have yet to counter the arguments that making dialogic teaching general practice will lower expectations, invite students to engage in “idle chatter in class” (Alexander, 2015, p. 430), or otherwise waste time they could spend on memorizing facts and procedures aimed at raising scores on standardized tests. Many in the field have called for research on dialogic learning to move to the next stage (Resnick, Asterhan, & Clarke, 2015; Howe & Abedin, 2013), lest we remain, as Alexander suggests, “a scattered community of single-case cottage industries” (2015, p. 430). Many believe it is past time to put to serious test our shared belief that dialogic forms of instruction can become the normal way in which we teach. Such a test would require large-scale, long-term research programmes in which dialogic teaching would be mounted not just in a few classrooms for a 559

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few hours a week but in multiple classrooms, even entire schools, for much of the school day, over several years. We and others (Resnick, Russell, & Schantz, forthcoming; Osborne, 2015; Alexander, 2015, 2018) have written about the layers of systemic changes this would require, and it is not within the province of this chapter to describe them in detail. Here, we will address what is arguably the first challenge: the need to convince teachers, parents, and policy makers that this agenda has a good chance to succeed. This effort would require us to bring forward evidence that the broad spectrum of our students can successfully participate. We present such evidence in this chapter. Drawing on developmental psychology, we show that even very young children know enough about the world they live in to be able to argue and reason about it rather than just rehearsing what their teachers say. In fact, from infancy children are primed to learn through interactions with others.They have knowledge of the structure of conversations and knowledge of content. We argue that these skills and abilities are part of the human birthright. In other words, they do not appear to depend on instruction. We begin with a brief review of how scholars’ views of learning became linked to language. Then, in the second section, we review well-documented evidence that virtually all children, from infancy on, understand fundamental principles of linguistic exchange. In the third section, we show that infants also have a basic understanding of numbers, and some rudimentary physics knowledge. In the fourth section, we look at research suggesting that infants can recognize cues to others’ emotions and intentions, a skill that is critical to engaging with literature. In the final section, we encourage these two streams of research—the work on dialogic learning that is deeply rooted in education and the work on infants’ intuitive understandings that lies at the intersection of developmental and cognitive psychology—to flow into one river. We discuss how we might begin to shift educational practice to capitalize on all children’s abilities and knowledge.

Language and thinking The period between the 1930s and the end of the twentieth century was intellectually tumultuous for scholars interested in language, learning, reasoning, and human development in general. For decades, the dominant view of psychologists, philosophers, and educators was that children were “empty vessels” whose minds needed to be “filled up” with proper facts, words, grammars, computational procedures, and other specific skills and knowledge that society respected and rewarded. Hints of other ways to imagine intellectual development existed, of course. For example, philosophers such as John Dewey, physicians such as Maria Montessori, and musicians such as Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (to mention just three, very different, thinkers and social actors) believed that children’s natural interests and capabilities could serve as both motivator and “shaper” of learning. Although these ideas were enacted in various experimental and demonstration programmes, to many they seemed “way out,” “soft,” or suitable for only a few students. In the 1960s, scholars became interested in the views of sociologist George Herbert Mead, whose ideas had not received widespread attention during his time. Mead argued that thought was “the conversation of the generalized other with the self ” (Mead, 1922/1964, p. 246; see also Mead, 1934). Thinking served as a rehearsal for an actual act of communication; therefore, it always occurred in relation to others. At about the same time word began to drift out of Russia into Europe (especially Scandinavia) about psychologist Lev Vygotsky and other Soviet scholars’ theory that individual cognitive competence developed through interactive verbal engagement with others (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). In this view, language and interaction are central to thought and thus, to learning. 560

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During the same general time period, sociologists, linguists, and anthropologists in Britain, America, and Europe were developing initially startling theories of “situated” and “socially shared” cognition. These were not, for the most part, focused on learning in school. Indeed, there was a distinctly “anti-schooling” flavour to some of the most widely read situated cognition research, but interest was growing. Resnick’s 1987 presidential address for the American Educational Research Association summarized some of this research and challenged scholars of education and learning to consider how the expanding concept of situated cognition might improve school-based efforts to develop students’ reasoning capacities and raise levels of learning more generally. Evidence of intelligent, interactive problem solving among people who were not highly educated continued to appear (Heath, 1991; Heath & Luff, 1992; Hutchins, 1995; Pontecorvo & Fasulo, 1997; Resnick et al., 1997; Suchman, 1997). The genie was out of the bottle. If adults learned through discussing problems and debating solutions with one another, then why were children expected to learn by listening and repeating what their teachers said? Studies began to emerge showing that relatively short-term participation in classrooms that invited students to discuss and argue about the task at hand could produce surprising gains. Compared to their peers who did not learn through discussion, these students showed better initial learning of the material taught (e.g., Wilkinson, Murphy, & Binici, 2015). In some cases, they retained their learning benefits for more than one year, though the intervention had ended (e.g., Adey & Shayer, 2015;Topping & Trickey, 2015;Trickey & Topping, 2004). Sometimes, their learning transferred to other subject-matters, as measured by national examinations, state tests, tests of general cognitive abilities, and other assessments (e.g., respectively, Adey & Shayer, 2015; O’Connor et al., 2015; Topping & Trickey, 2015; Sun, Anderson, Perry, & Lin, 2017). What might make it possible for such indirect forms of educational engagement to produce such surprising gains? Taking a new approach to this question, we turn to another stream of research, in the field of developmental psychology—specifically, infants’ intuitions about the world. To our knowledge, this research has not been brought “into conversation” with research on dialogic teaching and learning before. In the following sections, we provide evidence that even very young children are equipped with a general understanding of the rules of communication as well as foundational content knowledge. The examples that we provide to showcase children’s impressive understanding of basic maths, physics, and the reasons behind other individuals’ actions are by no means exhaustive and are only meant to highlight a few aspects of the rich content knowledge children possess long before they enter formal schooling.

Children’s intuitive knowledge Communicative development In order for children to learn from verbal exchanges with others, they need an understanding of the rules and the purposes of communication. The foundation for this understanding is present early in life. Caregivers model the appropriate rules starting with non-verbal communication, which sets the stage for later verbal communication (Iverson & Wocniak, 2016). In general, “infants act, mothers interpret their acts as deictic, referential signals and provide a translation, and they both learn gradually to adjust their behaviours according to each other’s attention and responses, thus facilitating children’s linguistic communication” (Wu & Gros-Louis, 2014). As early as one week after birth, infants are able to follow another person’s gaze.This ability has been labelled “proto-conversational” (Bateson, 1979) because its turn-taking structure mirrors that of later verbal communication (Legerstee & Varghese, 2001; Markova & Legerstee, 2006). 561

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Around two to three months of age, they can exchange facial expressions and noises with adults. By eight to ten months, an infant is able to understand that he or she and an adult are looking at the same object. Bruner (1983) and Tomasello (1999) argue that such “triadic joint attention” sets the stage for vocabulary acquisition because it provides the child with the opportunity to learn the appropriate word to refer to an object when the adult labels the object that they are both attending to. While joint attention may initially serve as a starting point to learn about objects that are physically present, the concept can also be applied to sharing knowledge about abstract ideas later in development. Initially, infants vocalize at will and mothers (and presumably other adults) tailor their behaviour in response (Gros-Louis, West, Goldstein, & King, 2006). Beyond 24 months, however, the pattern changes. Children interrupt less, and they begin to coordinate their vocalizations with their mothers’ (Rutter & Durkin, 1987). In addition, children look more at their social interaction partners as they are finishing their own vocalization, indicating that the partners can prepare for their turns. Thus, from two years on, children play a much more active part in controlling the sequencing of verbal interaction. Their abilities develop as they gain experience in more complex social contexts and interactions with a variety of social partners. By the time they enter school, children have acquired a rich repertoire of verbal and non-verbal communicative rules that they can use to engage meaningfully with others.

Early mathematical understanding Beginning in the 1950s, developmental psychologists developed new methods to examine preverbal infants’ perception and cognition in greater detail than was previously possible with observational methods. Robert Fantz, an early pioneer, invented a method called visual habituation, in which the infant is repeatedly shown the same object until the infant’s looking time decreases substantially (e.g. 50%), presumably signifying a loss of interest. When the infant is presented with a new object, he or she typically shows renewed interest in looking at it. This recovery of interest was interpreted as signaling the infant’s ability to discriminate between the initial stimulus and the new stimulus. This new method allowed psychologists to gain insights into aspects of the infant’s mind that had previously been unstudied (see Colombo & Mitchell, 2009, for a recent review of this period of newly developing methods for studying infant cognition). In the following decades, developmental psychologists used these visual habituation methods to study infants’ developing knowledge of quantities. For example, Xu and Spelke (2000) showed that 6-month-olds can discriminate images containing 8 dots from images containing 16 dots. However, they were not able to discriminate images containing 8 dots from those containing 12 dots. The infants did not appear to be counting. Instead, they can only discriminate between sets of objects with more than four items when there is a large enough difference between the numbers. This suggests that the ratio rather than the absolute difference between the numbers determines infants’ success. Thus, from a very young age children have access to approximate numerical information. Infants’ ability to discriminate between quantities provides the basis for performing nonsymbolic arithmetic. For example, five-month-olds look longer when one puppet is added to another puppet behind an occluder (such as a screen) and only one puppet is revealed, compared to when two puppets are revealed, suggesting that they understand that 1 + 1 ≠ 1 (Wynn, 1992). Similarly, nine-month-olds look longer when five objects are added to five objects behind an occluder but only five objects are revealed, suggesting that they also understand that 5 + 5 ≠ 5 (McCrink & Wynn, 2004). In both studies, infants showed parallel behaviours when subtraction events were presented. 562

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Infants also appear to have a basic understanding of ratios and probabilities. McCrink and Wynn (2007) showed that 6-month-olds look longer when both the number of objects changes and the ratio between them changes (e.g., when 22 blue dots and 11 yellow dots changed to 24 yellow dots and 6 blue dots), compared to when the number of objects changed but the ratio remained the same (e.g., 8 yellow dots and 4 blue dots changed to 32 yellow dots and 16 blue dots). This ability to recognize ratios may provide the foundation for infants’ remarkable ability to understand probabilities and statistics. In a series of experiments, Xu and Garcia (2008) showed that eight-month-olds can both infer what the distribution in a population should look like given a random sample and vice versa. In one set of experiments, an experimenter drew random samples of five balls from a box without revealing the contents of the entire box to the infant.Then the contents of the box were revealed. Infants looked significantly longer when the contents did not match the distribution of colors in the sample they had seen (e.g., when they had seen four red balls and one white ball being pulled out of the box, but the box contained mostly white balls). Another set of experiments involved showing infants the contents of the box, followed by random samples. Infants looked longer at samples that did not match the contents of the box, compared to the samples that matched. Thus, these experiments suggest that infants are able to form expectations about populations and samples given prior information about random samples or the population respectively.

Rudimentary physics From early on, infants have a rudimentary understanding of object properties that form the basis of elementary physics. For example, Kellman and Spelke (1983) showed that infants expect objects to be cohesive units even when they are partially hidden from view. In this study, four-month-olds were habituated to an object (e.g., a triangle) that was partially covered by another object (e.g., a rectangle). The two fragments of the triangle moved back and forth behind the rectangle. After repeated exposure to these displays, infants were shown the complete triangle or the two fragments (without the occluder).They looked significantly longer at the two fragments, suggesting that they expected a connected object, rather than two fragments, behind the occluder. Similarly, infants expect objects only to move along continuous, unobstructed paths. In one study, four-month-olds were habituated to displays with two rectangular occluders and moving objects (Spelke & Kestenbaum, 1986). Half of the infants saw one object moving across the stage from left to right, first disappearing behind one occluder, then reappearing in the space between the two occluders, then disappearing behind the second occluder, and finally reappearing to the right of the second occluder. The other half of the infants saw one object moving across the stage from left to right in the same fashion except that the object did not reappear between the two occluders. After habituating infants to these displays, all were shown displays with one object or two objects. Infants who had previously seen the object reappear between the two occluders looked longer when presented with two objects, suggesting that they expected only one object that had been moving on a continuous path. In contrast, infants who had previously not seen the object reappear looked longer at the single object, suggesting that they had expected two objects— as a single object would not be able to disappear in one place and “magically” reappear in another.

Rudimentary understanding of other people’s intentions and behaviour Similar to their basic understanding of objects and their characteristics, infants have a nascent understanding of social agents and their behaviours, knowledge that is crucial for engaging with characters and plots in stories. For example, nine-month-olds were repeatedly shown an 563

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actor reaching for one of two toys that were always presented in the same locations (Woodward, 1998). Subsequently, the locations of the toys were switched. Infants looked longer when the actor reached for the second toy, even though the actor was reaching toward a familiar location. These findings suggest that infants interpreted the actor’s initial action as wanting one specific toy. Interestingly, when the actor’s arm and hand were replaced with a rod, infants did not look differentially at the two toys, suggesting that they only made goal-directed attributions to the person, not to an inanimate object. Infants’ understanding of goal-directed behaviour in others can also be seen in the way they imitate others’ actions. Meltzoff (1988) showed that 14-month-olds imitate an adult actor even in situations where the outcome could be achieved in a simpler way. In this study, children observed an adult actor turn on a light by hitting the light switch with his forehead even though the actor’s hands were free and could have been used to hit the switch.When infants were subsequently encouraged to turn on the light themselves, they were more likely to use their foreheads to hit the light switch than when they had not seen the actor perform this action before. These findings suggest that infants expect other human beings to act rationally. Importantly, when the actor’s hands were not free, infants no longer used their foreheads, suggesting that they understood that the person had a reason for this seemingly strange behaviour (Gergely, Bekkering, & Kiraly, 2002). Finally, infants are also capable of interpreting others’ actions as friendly or hostile. Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom (2007) showed ten-month-olds displays where an animate-looking shape tried to climb a hill but repeatedly failed. On some trials, they were then shown a second shape (the “helper”) pushing the first one up the hill, while on other trials, a third shape (the “hinderer”) pushed the first one down the hill. After infants were habituated to these behaviours, they were shown the first shape approaching the helper (i.e., an expected event because the helper had previously behaved in a friendly way) or the first shape approaching the hinderer (i.e., an unexpected event). Infants looked significantly longer at the unexpected events, suggesting that they were surprised that an animate-looking shape would approach a previously hostile character. Importantly, infants only made these social attributions when the shapes appeared animate. When the same shapes were inanimate (i.e., did not have eyes), infants did not look differentially at the two types of events. Thus, from a very young age, children show an understanding of basic concepts in maths and physics, as well as an understanding of other people’s intentions and emotions. We argue that this knowledge, paired with the understanding of the rules of communication, provides all children with the necessary foundation to engage in dialogic learning. To take a few examples, the rudimentary ideas infants appear to have about quantity prepare them to argue with other children about who has the bigger pile of blocks or to debate strategies for sharing snacks equally among the class. Similarly, their early understanding of motion as continuous supports their later understanding of the “big idea” that motion can be observed and described. And children who expect people to act with intention are primed to discuss why a character in a story might have behaved in a certain way.

Making dialogue central to education In the previous section, we suggested that research on infant cognition provides an explanation for why dialogic education can produce learning effects that far surpass those of direct instruction. Here, we flip the argument. The rich body of evidence of what infants appear to comprehend even mere days after birth affirms and supports dialogic teaching and learning over more traditional approaches. 564

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Dialogic pedagogies assume that students come into the classroom with built-in capacities, such as primitive strategies for reasoning and arguing, and enough knowledge of the world to pose their own questions, make observations, wonder about phenomena, and make connections among ideas. Therefore, teachers’ questions aim to evoke children’s conceptions about the problem at hand. Rather than “shopping for the right answer,” teachers highlight divergences in students’ views to push their thinking further.“So you disagree with Ramon?”“Kayla’s group had another solution—let’s put it on the board.” When a student stumbles, the teacher demonstrates and models waiting with interest to see what he or she is going to say. All students are assumed to have knowledge, questions, and ideas, so all are expected to step into the dialogic space: to listen, critique others’ statements, and argue with other students and even the teacher, and to defend and critique their own statements and conclusions. In contrast, let us consider the kind of instruction that treats students as “empty vessels” to be filled with the teacher’s small store of knowledge—the kind most students still experience. In these classrooms, verbal exchanges are dominated by teacher talk, often in the familiar form of teacher’s initiating question, student’s brief response, and teacher’s evaluation.When a student stumbles and falls silent, the teacher moves on, because the goal is for the class to produce the answer the teacher was looking for. In this view, a set body of knowledge exists, and students have little access to it, except through the teacher and authoritative texts.

Moving forward In this chapter we have assembled evidence from two quite separate streams of research. One, dialogic learning, is focused on deliberate efforts to improve learning and even intelligence (Resnick & Schantz, 2015a; Resnick & Schantz, 2015b). The second is focused on knowledge and intelligence that human beings demonstrate well before formal education begins. Taken separately the two are interesting, even intriguing. But taken together, we believe, they provide the seeds of a revolution in how we think about and attempt to improve learning and (yes) perhaps even intelligence. We invite our readers to join us in a collaborative effort to imagine what such an undertaking might mean. Here, we sketch out two of the implications. 1) This undertaking will not succeed as a “one off ” special opportunity in which a relatively small group of teachers and students are recruited for a research study. We need more large-scale projects like the Cambridge Primary Review Trust/University of York Dialogic Teaching Project (Alexander, 2018; Alexander, Hardman, Hardman, Rajab, & Longmore, 2017; Jay et al., 2017). The independent evaluators’ report ( Jay et al., 2017) names this project as the first randomized controlled trial in the UK that assessed the effects of dialogic teaching on academic outcomes, and we are not aware of any similar project of this scope elsewhere in the world. Positive features of the research design include the number of schools involved (76), the characteristics of the students (all schools had more than 20% of their students eligible for free school meals; more than half the students in the intervention group spoke English as an additional language), and the range of data that were gathered and analysed (standardized test scores, classroom videos over time, and participant surveys and interviews). The evaluators also planned to follow up on students’ progress after two years, as measured by the Key Stage 2 national exams. The intervention itself had several exemplary features. The form of dialogic teaching was based on Robin Alexander’s model, which had previously been trialed and shown to be effective in ten London schools. The project involved the core domains of maths, English, and science, rather than a single 565

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domain, as is typical. Finally, support for teachers was intensive and focused on their own context. Using video and audio clips of actual classroom practice, mentors guided participating teachers through 11 “planning/review/refocusing” cycles over the course of the 20-week intervention. 2) Teachers who participated in the project indicated that not all aspects of the curriculum were suitable for dialogic teaching ( Jay et al., 2017). Therefore, we need to develop more tasks that can be approached dialogically (i.e., problems that students can discuss and argue about in an attempt to arrive at either a shared solution or an analysis of disagreements). Further, these tasks should be sequenced in courses of study that take into account the evidence of infants’ and young children’s intuitions that we have sampled here—in other words, that build on what students already know. Some of this work has been attempted. For example, the lessons in the Cognitive Acceleration through Science (CASE) programme were based on Piaget’s schemata of formal operations (Adey & Shayer, 1990; Adey & Shayer, 2015), which Piaget in turn distilled from interviews with young children (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). In their discussion of the development of a maths programme similar to CASE for young students, Shayer and Adhami (2010) refer to research with infants and other children under age five, as well as the unschooled maths knowledge of “street traders” (Nunes, Schliemann, & Carraher, 1993). And in the US, at least one “reform” maths curriculum, called “Everyday Mathematics,” claims to be grounded in children’s intuitions and informal knowledge (“Everyday Mathematics: How Children Learn,” n.d.). However, these do not represent the school experiences of most students.

Conclusion The field of dialogic education stands at a major point of possibility and of concern. The movement for dialogic teaching and learning is an attempt to reclaim—for students, for educators, for society—a theory of learning that assumes human beings have the mental and linguistic capabilities to make sense of the world they live in. Further, the theory asserts that the capacity to argue and reason is not limited to an elite but is available—with proper support and challenge—to individuals from all social groups. As we have shown in this chapter, this assertion is supported by a robust body of research from developmental and cognitive psychology. The possibilities can hardly be overstated, because we are talking about expanding human capacity. The concern is that scholars and researchers will continue to produce studies that—although well designed and scientifically supported—will fail to produce important changes in educational practice. This will happen because the claims being made for the power of dialogic learning and instruction fundamentally challenge the dominant view of what knowledge is, how intelligence develops, and—indeed—how intelligence is distributed in society. Rather than continuing with “business as usual,” scholars and researchers must respond in a way that is commensurate with the magnitude of this challenge. We must explore multiple variants of dialogic learning, in multiple subject matters, with large, diverse groups of students. We will need more long-term studies (and perhaps fewer “case studies”) in as many different social and educational settings as possible. Instead of short bursts of dialogic experiences, we will need programmes of dialogic learning that provide something like the ongoing conditions for mental growth that students in selective institutions find in their years of schooling. We will need to maximize use of today’s technologies for observation and data analysis. And we will need to develop and support communities of educators who themselves are comfortable in dialogic environments and who are the co-developers with scholars of systematic dialogic strategies of teaching. 566

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Note 1 Exceptions to this statement include the Philosophy for Children (P4C) project which involved one year of P4C instruction in 48 schools in England (Education Endowment Foundation, 2015); the Cambridge Primary Review Trust/University of York Dialogic Teaching Project, involving a 20-week intervention in 38 schools (Alexander, 2018), which we discuss at the end of this chapter; and the ongoing “Classroom Dialogue: Does it really make a difference for student learning?” project at the University of Cambridge which involves relating patterns of dialogue to students’ learning outcomes in classrooms across the country (www.educ.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/classroomdialogue).

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The future of dialogic education Sun, J., Anderson, R. C., Perry, M., & Lin, T. J. (2017). Emergent leadership in children’s cooperative problem solving groups. Cognition and Instruction, 35(3), 212–235. Tomasello, M. (1999). The human adaptation for culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28(1), 509–529. Topping, K. J., & Trickey, S. (2015). The role of dialogue in philosophy for children. In L. B. Resnick, C. S. C. Asterhan & S. N. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 99–110). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Trickey, S., & Topping, K. J. (2004). Philosophy for children: A systematic review. Research Papers in Education, 19(3), 365–380. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and Language (E. Hanfmann & G.Vakar, Eds., Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). In M. Cole,V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner & E. Souberman (Eds.), Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilkinson, I. A. G., Murphy, P. K., & Binici, S. (2015). Dialogue-intensive pedagogies for promoting reading comprehension: What we know, what we need to know. In L. B. Resnick, C. S. C. Asterhan & S. N. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 37–50). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Woodward, A. L. (1998). Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor’s reach. Cognition, 69(1), 1–34. Wu, Z., & Gros-Louis, J. (2014). Infants’ prelinguistic communicative acts and maternal responses: Relations to linguistic development. First Language, 34(1), 72–90. Wynn, K. (1992). Addition and subtraction by human infants. Nature, 358(6389), 749. Xu, F., & Garcia,V. (2008). Intuitive statistics by 8-month-old infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(13), 5012–5015. Xu, F., & Spelke, E. S. (2000). Large number discrimination in 6-month-old infants. Cognition, 74(1), B1–B11.

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39 DIALOGIC THINKING TOGETHER TOWARDS ABSTRACT REASONING Paul Webb

The positive effects of dialogic education have been evident for a long time. As early as the 1930s Vygotsky argued that the basis of effective learning lies in the type of social interaction that takes place between two or more people with different levels of skills and knowledge. This view is supported by the findings on Matthew Lipman’s early 1970s ‘Philosophy for Children Project’, which revealed that children who learned to discuss issues effectively in class did better than other children of the same age in terms of reading, reasoning, and thinking in general (Lipman, Sharp, & Oscanyan, 2010; Trickey & Topping, 2004). In turn, Shayer and Adey’s Cognitive Acceleration in Science Education (CASE) project, which focused on group work and discussions in science classes, showed that the participating children achieved better than expected not only in science but also in mathematics and English language (Shayer & Adey, 2002). A number of other studies, which included integrated approaches such as reading text, writing notes and reports, and, notably, conducting first-hand investigations with frequent discussion of key issues, have shown that children who engaged in such processes made significantly greater gains on measures of science understanding, science vocabulary, and science writing than those who did not (Cervetti, Barber, Dorph, Pearson, & Goldschmidt, 2012; Webb, 2009; Hand, 2007; Klentschy, Garrison, & Amaral, 1999). Many other science education research articles produced over the past 30 years have reflected this shift in emphasis from a Piagetian view of an individual struggling to make sense of the world to the Vygotskian notion of the social construction of knowledge (Hodson, 2009). It was Joan Solomon who suggested the metaphor of children learning in a science classroom as individuals sitting on the edge of a circle of people, trying make sense of the conversation while being initiated into something strange and new and then gradually taking part in the discussion in a way that makes sense to everyone else in order to be accepted (Solomon, 1994). Solomon’s metaphor is reflective of the changing shift in ways of viewing the learning of science, a shift that has found more and more traction with growing evidence for the efficacy of engaging children in discussion. Resnick, Asterhan, and Clarke (2015) point out that in many cases dialogic forms of teaching and learning have shown remarkable results in terms of raised student achievement and retention of knowledge in traditional tests in virtually every school subject. A range of names have been used for such forms of dialogic teaching and learning. Resnick et al. called it ‘productive discussion’. Examples of other names under this umbrella description are ‘exploratory talk’ (Mercer, 570

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Wegerif, & Dawes, 1999), ‘collaborative reasoning’ (Chinn & Anderson, 1998; Reznitskaya et al., 2012), ‘critical discussion’ (Keefer, Zeitz, & Resnick, 2000), ‘accountable talk’ (Michaels & O’Connor, 2002), ‘argumentation’ (see Osborne, 2010), and argumentive discussion (Nussbaum & Asterhan, 2016). Such dialogic approaches have also been described as ‘thinking aloud with others’ (Monaghan, 2005). Whatever the name used, there appears to be growing agreement on the nature of this type of classroom dialogic interaction in that it is typically structured and focused but not dominated by the teacher. It is open-ended and generates individual and collective reasoning. Everyone has an opportunity to provide explanations for their claims and listen and react to each other’s ideas. There is opportunity for constructive conflict and counter proposals, with the aim of reaching some form of consensus. It is a dialogic process that allows individuals to reason together and co-construct understanding (Wilkinson, Murphy, & Binici, 2015). From here on, in this chapter, this overarching form of interaction will be referred to as ‘dialogic thinking together’, with the implication that it is a process that enables meaningful thinking through dialogue within and among groups in classrooms.

More than just learning subject matter As already noted, dialogical approaches to teaching and learning have resulted in children performing better on science tests, sometimes with better retention of knowledge over two to three years. One example is Mercer and colleagues’ (2004) study which revealed a statistically significant improvement in the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in England and Wales science test scores after exploratory talk was promoted in classrooms. However, what is even more remarkable are the many science education studies that showed concomitant improvement in mathematics and English scores (Webb, 2010; Trickey & Topping, 2004). It is these findings that first suggested that something more than just learning science was taking place when engaging in dialogic thinking together in science classrooms. This ‘something more’ taking place can be categorised as transfer of learning. Transfer in this sense is being able to perform well in new situations, to be able to adapt what has been taught to solve problems and do things that are new or different from what has been learned, and even in some cases, to develop skills or abilities that appear to be totally unrelated to what has been taught and learned (Barnett & Ceci, 2002). When one looks at curricula such as the United States Common Core Standards, it becomes clear that there is an expectation of transfer beyond what is being taught. For example, the Common Core Standards Initiative (2010) for English Language Arts states that ‘The skills and knowledge captured in the ELA/ literacy standards are designed to prepare students for life outside the classroom’ and that ‘Students will learn to use cogent reasoning and evidence collection skills that are essential for success in college, career, and life’ (p. 3). In fact many, if not most, curricula have transfer in one form or another as an aspirational aim. What is not clear, however, is what type of teaching results in such learning, exactly what type of transfer is desired, or even how it should be measured. Other criticisms of claims of transfer are that it is not clear exactly what is meant by the term, what its characteristics and dimensions are, and how it can be measured (Barnett & Ceci, 2004). While evidence for transfer in science education appears to have been available for decades, the debates over what transfer is, how it can be measured, and whether it even exists have been difficult to resolve. Barnett and Ceci (2002, p. 612) noted that ‘Despite a century’s worth of research, arguments surrounding the question of whether far transfer occurs have made little progress towards resolution’. They believe that the reason for this is because there is ‘little 571

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agreement on the nature of transfer, the extent to which it occurs, and understanding of its underlying mechanisms’. In response to the lack of an acceptable general framework in which studies claiming transfer can be situated, they designed their own to not only judge whether transfer has taken place or not but to be able to distinguish between ‘near’ and ‘far’ transfer.This framework uses two major dimensions, namely content and context. Content involves specific information or procedures or a general strategy or rule; whether the performance measures are the same as or different from those used in training; and what sorts of memory demands the transfer task places on the participants. Context differentiates between the same or a different knowledge domain, physical context, temporality, social context, functional context, and modality of presentation. For each of these sub-dimensions, studies attempting to claim transfer can be placed on a near versus far continuum. The results may be mixed, for example a given study might involve far transfer on one sub-dimension but near transfer on another dimension (Barnett & Ceci, 2002).

Measuring transfer It was Mercer et al.’s (1999) study that compared children’s pre–post Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices Test scores before and after exposure to exploratory talk that explicitly associated children’s talk and the development of reasoning in the classroom. The Raven’s test is a wellestablished, reliable standardised psychological test of non-verbal abstract reasoning and problem solving (Kunda, McGreggor, & Goel, 2009). It is particularly appropriate for exploring links between language practices and the non-culturally biased tradition of research in cognitive development as they correlate well with similar tests of reasoning and with measures of academic achievement (Raven, Court, & Raven, 1995; Richardson, 1991). The Raven’s test is also seen by many to be the best assessment of abstract or non-verbal reasoning and is widely regarded as measuring the essence of the educative aspects of Spearman’s g, namely educative and reproductive ability (Jensen, 1998; Kaplan & Saccuzzo, 1997; Lynn, Allik, Pullmann, & Laidra, 2004). Educative ability means that one is able to educe relationships and/or further meaning from that what is known, while reproductive ability is the ability to reproduce a store of verbal concepts. In other words reproductive ability requires memory, while being able to educe abstract non-verbal problems requires the ability to reason in the abstract (Raven, Raven, & Court, 1998). These two abilities are the basis on which intelligence quotient tests are designed. Mercer et al.’s (1999) study revealed that when exploratory talk was facilitated with children aged nine to 11 years there were concomitant statistically significant gains made in Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM) test scores. These findings were important in that they suggested that dialogic practices of this type could result in transfer of learning to an educative ability, in this case the ability to reason better in abstract situations. Looking more closely at Mercer and colleagues’ (1999) study, we can see that while their research linked children’s ability to use exploratory talk meaningfully in class with statistically significant gains in Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM) scores, the focus of the classroom discussion was on how to solve problems on the RSPM test. While there was distance in terms of social context and modality (group discussion to individual written tests), these findings still do not suggest full far transfer in that the knowledge domains are related and the physical and functional contexts were similar (testing within the framework of the intervention). As such, the transfer effects would be classified as ‘near transfer’ within Barnett and Ceci’s (2002) framework. More evidence was needed before strong claims of far transfer via dialogic teaching and learning approaches could be made. 572

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Additionally, while many of the studies mentioned previously suggest that transfer of learning had taken place, there are also a number of dialogue studies that have not (Reznitskaya et al., 2012). Some have shown delayed transfer (Kuhn & Crowell, 2011; Morehouse & Williams, 1998), and most have been criticised because of what has been perceived as lack of methodological rigour in that they have only used small sample sizes and that the results achieved have only been of small practical significance (Wilkinson et al., 2015). A series of seven studies in South Africa have been reviewed in an attempt resolve some of the issues raised previously about claims of transfer of learning by using Barnett and Ceci’s taxonomy as an explanatory framework and attempting to meet the caveats around methodology, rigour, effects sizes, and standardised measures independent of what was taught (Webb,Whitlow, & Venter, 2017). These studies were all conducted over a 6- to 12-month period in science and mathematics classrooms. All were carried out using similar dialogic thinking together (exploratory talk) interventions with pre–post testing of the children’s reasoning abilities. All but one used the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices test as an indicator of the ability to reason.Their quasi-experimental designs all had experimental groups of teachers being introduced to, and trained in, the use of exploratory talk, while the teachers in the comparison groups were not. In each case, assessment of the processes of implementation and assessment of exploratory talk were the same, and a shared method for assessing was used to consider whether authentic dialogic thinking together (exploratory talk) had taken place or not in the classrooms. Classroom observation records were used to provide insights into the types of discourse and interactions that took place. The criteria used to determine whether classroom discussion had taken place were the ability of learners to engage in the lexicon (use the words appropriately), use scientific explanations (apply connectives), and engage in discourses that included descriptions, predictions, explanations, and arguments. While a minimum criterion was used as a ‘cutoff ’ point for judging whether classroom discussion had taken place or not (namely that each of the previous interactions had been exhibited at least once and that two of the three were exhibited three or more times per classroom observation), qualitative evaluations of the quality of interactions were also important when determining whether classroom discussion had taken place or not. Sample sizes across the studies ranged from 146 to 1,192 children with all but two of the studies focused on 11–12-year-olds. One of the other two studies focused on 12–14-yearold children and the other on young adults at undergraduate level at university. In all the cases where facilitation of dialogic thinking together (exploratory talk) was successful, there were statistically significant differences between the gains on the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM) test pre–post achievement scores in favour of the experimental groups.Where teachers were unable to promote the desired level of dialogue in their classrooms, namely where the participants were judged to have not met the criteria required to successfully engage their students in thinking together activities, there were no statistically significant improvements in Raven’s test score. This finding neatly underscores the association between exploratory talk in classrooms and significant improvement in RSPM scores. The differences between the pre–post gain scores of the experimental groups over the comparison ones were at least at the 95% level of confidence (p ≤ 0.05) with large effect sizes in three studies and moderate effect sizes in the other two. In each case there was considerable distance in terms of knowledge domain (from exploratory talk around science and mathematics topics to solving test items in the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices test) and in terms of temporal context (pre–post testing over six months to a year). Although the physical context was similar (both activities occurred in a classroom at a school), there was considerable distance in terms of social context and modality (from group discussion in science or mathematics to individual completion of the Raven’s tests). 573

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As one would not expect to see improved Raven’s test scores when using an intervention like exploratory talk unless the participants were specifically trained on non-verbal reasoning, these findings suggest far transfer in terms of Barnett and Ceci’s (2002) framework, namely the ability to apply what was learned to tasks that are new or different from the specific training that has taken place. The new and different learning that took place during dialogic thinking together on science and mathematics topics was improved abstract reasoning abilities as measured by the Raven’s tests and, as such, can be classified as ‘far transfer’. This finding is notable as abstract reasoning has long been considered to be an inherited ability which cannot be learnt or altered. It is also important because it has implications for how we view and understand the effects of children thinking together dialogically (Webb et al., 2017).

Thinking together to change our thinking processes As noted earlier, Raven’s tests make up the ‘heritable’ aspect of ‘Intelligence Quotient’ (IQ) testing. Whatever one may think of IQ testing, the findings that there were statistically significant improvements on Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices test mean scores between students who participated in dialogic thinking together practices compared to the mean scores of children who did not suggests that something unexpected, and probably important, happened. What is important is that, in contrast to the ‘determined by inheritance’ position on abstract reasoning, the findings indicate that abstract reasoning can be mediated by language and developed by adult guidance and social interaction. Kan, Wicherts, Dolan, and van der Maas (2013) have also challenged the ‘heritable’ assumption about abstract reasoning and claim that societal demands influence the development and interaction of cognitive abilities. They also stress that social interactions can raise the general intelligence factor, g, which, as noted earlier, encompasses two kinds of mental ability, one that can be learned and one that is assumed to be inborn. The notion that non-verbal reasoning can be mediated by language and developed by adult guidance and social interaction amongst peers, without the provision of any specific training in solving these problems, is central to explanations of the effects of dialogic interactions on mental abilities. In terms of Intelligence Quotient tests, it is interesting to note that in England and the Netherlands IQ scores have increased considerably over the last 100 years (Flynn, 2009). Similar trends have been seen in other countries around the world, but currently increases seem to be ‘tailing-off ’ in developed countries while still rising in developing countries. Improvements have been attributed by some to better literacy and schooling, in other words they have been learned. However, what is most interesting is that the greatest gains have been in the non-verbal abstract reasoning aspects of the test. If, as claimed previously, we can facilitate far transfer via dialogue in school subjects to apparently unrelated abstract reasoning, this raises the question ‘do approaches such as dialogic thinking together make children more intelligent?’ After studying IQ data gathered over decades in 14 different countries, Flynn (1987) came to the conclusion that improved scores on the Raven’s test do not mean that people have necessarily become more ‘intelligent’. His reasons are that solving abstract reasoning tests is not the same as solving real-world problems and that the Raven’s tests really only reflect a correlation with a weak causal link to intelligence. In other words, he feels that all we can say with a degree of certainty is that tests like the Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices measure abstract problemsolving ability. He also notes that different kinds of reasoning may be appropriate in different circumstances (Flynn, 2009). For example, using abstractions and logic may not have been of much use to people who lived simple lives in contexts that did not demand abstract reasoning skills. However, today most people live in a modern world mediated by symbols and abstractions 574

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where thinking relies less and less on memory and more and more on abstract representations and the logic that they imply. Flynn believes that there are many factors that can be attributed to changes in thinking processes. He cites, for example, different schooling, smaller family size, modern parenting, the rise of a visual culture, more jobs that require problem solving, more leisure, and the social interaction between parents, children, and peers. In terms of peer interactions, which are probably the most pertinent aspect in terms of the contents of this chapter, he believes that there has been a decrease in oral socialisation between children as a result of the growing use of modern technology and social media. He then links the levelling off of the overall mean IQ scores over the past decade to the recorded decrease in IQ scores for the adolescent portion of the population (Flynn, 2009). Others have a more positive take on the effects of technology than Flynn, particularly in terms of the social media aspects of the Internet. For example, Wegerif (2016) sees a role for modern technology in taking us out of our home space and culture and into dialogue with a much wider grouping of ‘others’ than we would normally encounter. Like Gee (2005), he likes the idea of the ‘affinity spaces’ that open up between a host of possible respondents when one writes a forum post or blog. However, the important caveat is that it is the type of talk that is important if it is to be effective. It is how people interact with others and the nature of such interactions that are highlighted in studies of dialogic interactions for learning. As such, there are many research opportunities for investigating how far thinking together could be achieved online (see for example, Asterhan & Hever, 2015). Similarly, there are also questions as to what other desirable transfer effects might be achieved, for example discourse situations around sustainability, aesthetics, alternate worldviews, interrogating the veracity of ‘news’ and opinions, and what it means to be ‘scientific’. The idea of devising and implementing a programme to develop ‘scientific minds’ in all citizens has been an aim of the Learning Development Institute (Building the Scientific Mind, 2015). Such a mind is one with the attitudes and skills – cognitive and meta-cognitive ones – that disposition people to question facts and critically challenge the ‘givenness’ of any a priori knowledge and authority. If we consider that, for the first time in the existence of human civilisation, we have the potential to determine our survival as a species – and the extinction of many other species – developing the attributes of a ‘scientific’ mind appears to be of great importance. If life as we currently know it requires more abstract reasoning than was the case in the past to enable the logic and reasoning required for survival, and if there is something rooted in human interactions such as dialogic thinking together that promotes such reasoning abilities, it seems vital to better understand not only how we promote abstract reasoning but also how it occurs. In turn, how it occurs does not only mean ‘what we do to make it happen’, but ‘what it does to us when we make it happen’.

Thinking together to change our brains As much as half a century ago Lipman claimed that we all have the ability to think abstractly from an early age and that by talking about issues we learn to think and argue logically. In turn Greeno (2006) points out that thinking logically is an attribute associated with openness to the ideas of multiple others (Greeno, 2006). In other words, reasoning acquires conceptual agency through participation in ‘conversations that matter’ (Greeno, 2006). There are many papers and reviews on how we make such conversations happen, with most based on sociocultural theory (Resnick et al., 2015; Trickey & Topping, 2004; Shayer & Adey, 2002). Few tell us what such conversations do to us when they happen. Does something happen to our brains because we 575

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have learned to communicate and interact with each other in new ways? Is it because, as Flynn believes, we use our brains differently to the ways in which our parents, grandparents, and greatgrandparents used them? There are many studies that show that thinking together effects our thinking, our minds, and our brains. Some explanations are based on the well-established associations between working memory capacity and measures of problem solving (e.g., Ackerman, Beier, & Boyle 2005; Kane, Hambrick, & Conway, 2005; Oberauer, Schulze, Wilhelm, & Suss, 2005). Explanations linked to working memory are that thinking together provides practice in how to manage working memory capacity and thereby reduces cognitive load by explicitly structuring an argument and organising one’s thoughts. However, organising one’s thoughts through dialogic thinking together activities requires clear guidelines to achieve the goals of a good argument. Toulmin’s Argumentation Pattern (Toulmin, 2003), which sets out a straightforward manner of presenting an argument and how the aspects are related to each other, is widely used to organise one’s thoughts in science education studies which use ‘argumentation’ strategies. Effective learning techniques research has shown that certain ways of presenting information are more effective than others (Moulton, 2014). One is by giving students opportunities to practice retrieval of what they’ve learned (usually by testing), giving them practice that is spaced over time rather than all at once, and giving them practice with multiple topics intermixed rather than with one topic at a time (Roediger, 2013). The success of dialogic thinking together strategies could be attributed to promoting retrieval practice. That is, in order to make an argument, one has to remember the facts and concepts that one has studied to construct the argument and come back to the same material at different times. Similarly, developing an argument requires analysing data from current findings and constructing a coherent narrative, a process that requires interleaving different tasks to come to a claim. Doing so requires the ‘educative ability’ noted by Raven and colleagues (1995), namely problem identification, re-conceptualisation of the field, and monitoring proposed solutions for consistency within all available information. The application of ‘brain-based learning’ to a curriculum for teaching computer programming revealed better long-term retention of computer programming ability by students who had a ‘brain-compatible instruction’ compared to students who had not (van Niekerk & Webb, 2016). Recent advances have also been made in terms of understanding the biological basis of learning and memory at a synaptic level (Rudy, 2013) and in understanding the biological basis of learning and memory via computational models of brain function (Anderson, 2007). Advances in knowledge about how the brain changes as a result of learning, and how different parts of the brain are involved in the creation, storage, and retrieval of memories, mean that the use of brain science has become more and more a realistic and productive possibility in terms of understanding the effects of dialogic thinking together. If we do use our brains differently to the way in which our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents used them, as postulated by Flynn (2009), it is possible that we have altered some aspects of their functioning by doing so. Maguire, Woollett, and Speirs (2006) provide evidence for such a claim. They measured the brains of London taxi-drivers and showed that they have enlarged hippocampi, the area used for navigating three-dimensional space, which suggests that our brains can change physically as a function of task demands.

The future of dialogic thinking together Considering what has been highlighted in this chapter it may be said that there are three exciting developments that have occurred in terms of the future of dialogic education. The first is the widespread evidence that thinking together interventions can meet the cognitive 576

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goals of general improvement in thinking and reasoning. The second development is the increasing sophistication of cognitive theorising, which is able to link specific components of cognitive processes to measurable performance and even brain activation (Anderson, 2007). The third is an increasing focus on, and requirement of, rigorous assessment of the efficacy of educational interventions. Together these three developments point to linkages between sociocultural and cognitive-science approaches which, with the promising advances being made in terms of technologies that are available, suggest that many new findings are still to be made as to what well understood and carefully designed educational practices will be able to achieve (Roediger, 2013). While there is evidence of changes such as improved working memory capacity, brain activity, and synaptic growth when learning, educational designs linked to these findings rarely produce benefits in terms of learning skills beyond what is taught (Simons et al., 2016; Anderson, 2007). Some cognitive studies indicate near transfer, but evidence of far transfer remains elusive. In contrast, there have been multiple sociocultural interventions that have produced evidence of both near and far transfer but which have not been explained in terms of cognitive mechanisms. These lacunae provide an opportunity to adopt a different approach, namely, to take an intervention that has been shown to produce far transfer and attempt to diagnose what changes in cognitive machinery are associated with the intervention. In other words, rather than using cognitive theory to design training interventions and then looking for evidence of far transfer, the suggestion is to use sociocultural theory to create interventions that promote the desired attribute of better reasoning ability and then look for evidence of changes in cognition. In this way there are benefits for cognitive scientists in that they can examine the results of sociocultural research such as those provided by dialogic teaching and learning in light of cognitive factors that may affect the understandings of, for example, cognitive load theory, short term memory aspects, brain physiology and architecture, etc. In turn sociocultural researchers would have an opportunity to access cognitive understandings and theories that may help them understand their interventions in new and different ways, particularly when an intervention works in one context but not another.

Conclusion It has been suggested in this chapter that, in order to meet current existential challenges, humanity requires more abstract reasoning and logic than was the case in the past. Such reasoning includes developing dispositions that question facts and critically challenge ‘given’ knowledge. It has also been argued that developing better reasoning is rooted in dialogic thinking together practices that are underpinned by the use of language and argument which includes and respects the creative co-presence of other voices and ideas. In other words, such a mind acquires conceptual agency through openness to the ideas of others (Greeno, Collins, & Resnick, 1996). Dialogic thinking together has been presented as something that facilitates enculturation into a community of discourse, practice, and thinking and as an avenue to reaching the ‘holy grail’ of education, namely far transfer. As such, the products of such enculturation not only reflect changed individual and collective thinking processes but also result in changes in the architecture of brains – both of which may be vital to reasoning for our collective futures. If the previous premises are accepted, there is clearly an acute need to promote this type of teaching and learning as far and wide and at all levels as fast and as soon as is humanly possible. For many readers this statement will appear as self-evident and unnecessary. As noted in this chapter there have been clear indicators of the power of dialogic teaching and learning strategies over the past half-century. Studies led by, amongst others, Lipman, Shayer, and Adey, 577

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Trickey and Topping, Mercer and Wegerif, Resnick, Asterhan, and Clarke, etc. (apologies to the many omissions in this very incomplete selection) appear irrefutable. However, while there have been some effects on policy, for example Alexander’s work (see 2017) which resulted in dialogic education being included in the 2014 revised national curriculum for England, much still needs to be known about the effects of research on the official promotion of dialogic education worldwide. In fact uptake by teachers and teacher educators seems to be much slower than one would expect despite the plethora of evidence, suggesting that even greater, broader, and more vigorous advocacy is required over and above what is currently taking place.

References Ackerman, P. L., Beier, M. E., & Boyle, M. O. (2005). Working memory and intelligence: The same or different constructs? Psychological Bulletin, 131, 30–60. Alexander, R. J. (2017). Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk (5th edn).York: Dialogos. Anderson, J. R. (2007). How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe? New York: Oxford University Press. Asterhan, S. C. & Hever, R. (2015). Learning from reading argumentive group discussions in Facebook: Rhetoric style matters (again). Computers in Human Behavior, 53, 570–576. Barnett, S. & Ceci, S. (2002). When and where do we apply what we learn? A taxonomy for far transfer. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 612–637. DOI: 10.1037//0033-2909.128.4.612 Building the Scientific Mind. (2015). The Building the Scientific Mind Colloquia. Retrieved September 6, 2018 from http://www.learndev.org/BtSM2015.html Cervetti,G, Barber, J., Dorph, R., Pearson, P. D., & Goldschmidt, P. (2012). The impact of an integrated approach to science and literacy in elementary school classrooms. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 49(5), 631–658. Chinn, C., & Anderson, R. (1998). The structure of discussions that promote reasoning. Teachers College Record, 100, 315–368. Common Core State Standards Initiative. (2010). Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. Washington, DC: National Education Association. Flynn, J. R. (1987). Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure. Psychological Bulletin, 101(2), 171–191. Flynn, J. R. (2009). What is Intelligence: Beyond the Flynn Effect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gee, J. P. (2005). Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces. Beyond communities of practice, language power and social context. In D. Barton & K. Tusting (Eds.), Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power and Social Context (pp. 214–232). New York: Cambridge University Press. Greeno, J. G. (2006). Authoritative, accountable positioning and connected, general knowing: Progressive themes in understanding transfer. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 15(4), 537–547. Greeno, J. G., Collins, A. M., & Resnick, L. B., (1996). Cognition and learning. In D. C. Berliner & R. C. Calfee (Eds.), Handbook of Educational Psychology. New York: McMillan. Hand, B. (2007). Science Inquiry, Argument and Language: A Case for the Science Writing Heuristic. Rotterdam. Sense Publishers. Hodson, D. (2009). Teaching and Learning About Science: Language, Theories, Methods, History, Traditions and Values. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Jensen, A. (1998). The g Factor:The Science of Mental Ability. Westport, CT: Praeger. Kan, K.-J. Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C.V., & van der Maas, H. L. J. (2013). On the nature and nurture of intelligence and specific cognitive abilities: The more heritable, the more culture-dependent. Psychological Science, 24(10), 2420–2428. Kane, M. J., Hambrick, D. Z. & Conway, A. R. A. (2005). Working memory and fluid intelligence are strongly related constructs: Comment on Ackerman, Beier & Boyle (2005). Psychological Bulletin, 131, 66–71. Kaplan, R. M., & Saccuzzo, D. P. (1997). Psychological Testing: Principles, Applications and Issues. Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole. Keefer, M., Zeitz, C., & Resnick, L. (2000). Judging the quality of peer-led student dialogues. Cognition and Instruction, 18(1), 53–81.

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Dialogic thinking together Klentschy, M., Garrison, L., & Amaral, O. M. (1999). Valle Imperial Project in Science (VIPS): Four-Year Comparison of Student Achievement Data 1995–1999. El Centro, CA: El Centro Unified School District. Kuhn, D., & Crowell, A. (2011). Dialogic argumentation as a vehicle for developing young adolescents’ thinking. Psychological Science, 22, 545–552. Kunda, M., McGreggor, K., & Goel, A. (2009). Addressing the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test of general intelligence. In AAAI Fall Symposium on Multi Representational Architectures for Human Level Intelligence, Washington, DC. Lipman, M., Sharp, A., & Oscanyan, F. (2010). Philosophy in the Classroom. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lynn, R., Allik, J., Pullmann, H., & Laidra, K. (2004). Sex differences on the progressive matrices among adolescents: Some data from Estonia. Personality and Individual Differences, 36(6), 1249–1255. Maguire, E., Woollett, K. & Speirs, H. (2006). London taxi drivers and bus drivers: A structural MRI and neuropsychological analysis. Hippocampus, 16, 1091–1101. Mercer, N., Dawes, L., Wegerif, R., & Sams, C. (2004). Reasoning as a scientist: Ways of helping children to use language to learn science. British Educational Research Journal, 30(3), 359–377. Mercer, N.,Wegerif, R., & Dawes, L. (1999). Children’s talk and the development of reasoning in the classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 25(1), 95–111. Michaels, S., & O’Connor, M. (2002). Accountable Talk: Classroom Conversation that Works. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh. Monaghan, F. (2005). ‘Don’t think in your head, think aloud’: ICT and exploratory talk in the primary school mathematics classroom. Research in Mathematics Education, 7(1), 83–100. Morehouse, R., & Williams, M. (1998). Report on student use of argument skills. Critical and Creative Thinking, 6(1), 14–20. Moulton, S. T. (2014). Applying psychological science to higher education: Key findings and open questions. Retrieved June 18 2017 from http://hilt.harvard.edu/hilt-publications Nussbaum, E. M., & Asterhan, C. S. C. (2016).The psychology of far transfer from classroom argumentation. In J.Woods (Series Ed.), Studies in Logic & Argumentation, F. Paglieri (Ed.), The Psychology of Argumentation. London: College Publications. Oberauer, K., Schulze, R., Wilhelm, O. & Suss, H-M. (2005). Working memory and intelligence – Their correlation and relation: Comment on Ackerman, Beier, & Boyle (2005). Psychological Bulletin, 131, 61–65. Osborne, J. (2010). Arguing to learn in science: The role of collaborative, critical discourse. Science, 328(5977), 463–466. Raven, J., Court, J. & Raven, J. C. (1995). Manual for Raven’s Progressive Matrices and Vocabulary Scales. Oxford: Oxford Psychologists Press. Raven, J., Raven, J. C., & Court, J. H. (1998). Raven Manual: Section 4, Advanced Progressive Matrices, 1998 Edition. Oxford, UK: Oxford Psychologists Press Ltd. Resnick, L. B. C., Asterhan, C. S. C., & Clarke, S. N. (2015). Introduction: Talk, learning, and teaching. In L. B. Resnick, C. Asterhan & S. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 1–12). Washington, DC: AERA. Reznitskaya, A., Glina, M., Carolan, B., Michaud, O., Rogers, J., & Sequeira, L. (2012). Examining transfer effects from dialogic discussions to new tasks and contexts. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 37, 288–306. Richardson, K. (1991). Reasoning with Raven in and out of context. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 61 (2), 129–138. Roediger, H. L. (2013). Applying cognitive psychology to education: Translational educational science. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 1–3. Rudy, J. R. (2013). The Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (2nd en.). New York: Sinauer Associates. Shayer, M. & Adey, P. (2002). Learning Intelligence: Cognitive Acceleration Across the Curriculum from 5 to 15 Years. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Simons, D. J., Boot, W. R., Charness, N., Gathercole, S. E., Chabris, C. F., Hambrick, D. Z. & StineMorrow, E. A. L. (2016). Do “brain-training” programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17, 103–186. Solomon, J. (1994). The rise and fall of constructivism. Studies in Science Education, 23, 1–19. Toulmin, S. (2003). The Uses of Argument: Updated Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trickey, S., & Topping, K. (2004). Philosophy for children: A systematic review. Research Papers in Education, 19(3), 365–380.

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Paul Webb Van Niekerk, J., & Webb, P. (2016). The effectiveness of brain-compatible blended learning material in the teaching of programming logic. Computers & Education, 103, 16–27. Webb, P. (2009). Towards an integrated learning strategies approach to promoting scientific literacy in the South African context. International Journal of Environmental and Science Education, 4(3), 313–334. Webb, P. (2010). Science education and literacy: Imperatives for the developed and developing world. Science, 328(5977), 448–450. Webb, P.,Whitlow, J., & Venter, D. (2017). From exploratory talk to abstract reasoning: A case for far transfer? Educational Psychology Review, 29(3), 565–581. Wegerif, R. (2016). Applying dialogic theory to illuminate the relationship between literacy education and teaching thinking in the context of the Internet Age. Contribution to a special issue on International Perspectives on Dialogic Theory and Practice. In S. Brindley, M. Juzwik, & A. Whitehurst (Eds.), L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature (Vol. 16, pp. 1–21). Retrieved from http://dx.doi. org/10.17239/L1ESLL-2016.16.02.07 Wilkinson, I. A. G., Murphy, P. K., & Binici, S. (2015). Dialogue-intensive pedagogies for promoting reading comprehension: What we know, what we need to know. In L. B. Resnick, C. S. C. Asterhan, & S. N. Clarke (Eds.), Socializing Intelligence Through Academic Talk and Dialogue (pp. 35–48). Washington, DC: AERA.

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40 DIALOGUE AND SHARED COGNITION An examination of student–student talk in the negotiation of mathematical meaning during collaborative problem solving David Clarke and Man Ching Esther Chan

The process of classroom learning can be conceptualised in terms of progressively enhanced participation in forms of institutionalised social practice, where discourses constitute key components of that practice (Barwell, 2012; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Sfard, Forman, & Kieran, 2001). The discourse of a mathematics classroom, for example, has its own technical vocabulary and discursive and social conventions (Brousseau, 1986; Cobb & Bauersfeld, 1995). Argumentation within the mathematics classroom takes particular forms and draws upon assumptions or beliefs that are collectively accepted (Krummheuer, 1995). Students are initiated into the discourse of the mathematics classroom and particularly its distinctive forms of argumentation through teacher scaffolding of their negotiative use of language as they interact with their classmates and their teacher actively or passively, collaboratively or competitively. According to Krummheuer (1995), argumentation is primarily a social phenomenon where individuals make their reasoning accountable to others and “[try] to adjust their intentions and interpretations by verbally presenting the rationale of their action” (p. 229). Argumentation within (and outside of) the mathematics classroom is generally bound by collectively shared meanings and ritualised conventions, rather than strictly conforming to a logical or analytical structure (cf. Toulmin, 2003). Such argumentation is interactive where individuals construct their own understanding corresponding to the understanding of others (Krummheuer, 1995). The notion of meaning negotiation (D. Clarke, 2001; Cobb & Bauersfeld, 1995) captures this conceptualisation of the argumentation process where learning can be seen to occur in an indirect way through individuals’ participation in the collective social activity of argumentation in order to negotiate and renegotiate meaning to reach agreement or a shared understanding of each other’s thoughts. The previously described conceptualisation of the connection between classroom learning and the socially performed argumentation process appears to share many commonalities with the literature on dialogic processes (cf. Mercer, 2000; Mercer & Howe, 2012). Rather than framing classroom learning and argumentation in terms of dialogic processes, our contribution 581

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to the handbook is to explicate ideas of shared cognition or collective thinking (Mercer, 2000, 2016; Resnick, 1991) in the context of student collaborative problem solving within the mathematics classroom, suggest possible constructs or concepts for thinking about dialogic processes grounded in empirical evidence, and the associated pedagogical implications. Our focus is not on ways in which students express themselves verbally (i.e., different types of talk) but the forms by which individuals acknowledge both the existence of and the need to accommodate the thinking processes and actions of those with whom they are in collaboration. The next section explains the theoretical perspective and the conceptualisation of classroom learning that underpins our work.

Positioning our conceptualisation of classroom learning Our conceptualisation of classroom learning aligns with social constructivist perspectives of learning (cf. Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978), which focus on “the interdependence of social and individual processes in the co-construction of knowledge” (Palincsar, 1998, p. 345). These perspectives generally suggest that children construct meaning actively based on their existing knowledge and experience as they interact with their social settings. Learning is viewed in terms of the meaning or understanding that a child creates as part of his or her interactions with the settings over time (Lerman, 2001). Our work has been to seek to understand the social aspects of learning through examining individuals’ articulated thoughts and behaviours within the mathematics classroom setting, taking into consideration things such as shared meaning, normative social conventions, and cultural practices.

Classroom learning as meaning negotiation The process of learning can be seen as the construction of knowledge by students through their interaction and participation within the classroom setting. In their seminal work, Lave and Wenger (1991) conceptualised learning as a situated activity where learners began each as a newcomer, analogous to an apprentice, within a community of practice. Through various forms of socialisation, learners gain mastery of knowledge and skills in order to fully participate in the sociocultural practice of the community. Lave and Wenger coined the term “legitimate peripheral participation” (p. 29) to encapsulate this view of the learning process. In associating learning with participation in a community of practice, Lave and Wenger (1991) asserted that “participation is always based on situated negotiation and renegotiation of meaning in the world” (p. 51). They used the term situated learning to emphasise the relational character of knowledge and learning, the negotiated character of meaning, and the problemdriven nature of learning activity (p. 33). D. Clarke (2001) suggested that the presumptions of meaning are community, purpose, and situation, since it is futile to discuss the meaning of a word or term in isolation from the discourse community of which the speaker claims membership, from the purpose of the speaker, or from the specific situation in which the word was spoken. (p. 36) The negotiation of meaning may be concerned with the substantive mathematical content that is the pretext for the social gathering called “a mathematics class”, or it may be concerned with establishing a set of social obligations and responsibilities, without which neither a class nor a collaborative group will run smoothly. 582

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D. Clarke (2001) reasoned that for negotiation to take place, there needs to be something that is unresolved and uncertain. The inclination of humans to want to achieve consensus or intersubjectivity, where intersubjectivity is described as “a mutual or taken-as-shared understanding of an object or an event” (Cobb & Bauersfeld, 1995, p. 295), can be seen as a driving force for the negotiation of meaning by the actors within the classroom setting. Cobb and Bauersfeld (1995) defined the negotiation of meaning as “the interactive accomplishment of intersubjectivity” (p. 295). While acknowledging the importance of intersubjectivity in the meaning-negotiation process, D. Clarke (2001) reasoned that as meaning negotiation is mediated by language (or some form of conventionalised communicative process), which presumes intersubjectivity, some level of existing intersubjectivity is required for the negotiation to occur at all. In this conception, a level of student–student and student–teacher intersubjectivity is a prerequisite to the negotiative process, so that negotiation may proceed by the incremental refinement of intersubjectivity. This suggests that intersubjectivity is not only a goal but also a pre-condition for the negotiation of meaning within a classroom setting. Accordingly, classroom learning can be seen as a dynamic and complex social process where students participate in the negotiation and renegotiation of meaning with respect to various norms related to the subject matter and social convention, as the students immerse themselves within a community of practice. Intersubjectivity can be seen as a key construct bridging the boundary between the social and cognitive conceptualisations of learning, acting both as a precondition and the driving force behind the meaning-negotiation process.The construct appears to be relevant to notions of shared cognition or shared thinking, as explained as follows.

Socially shared cognition Vygotsky’s (1978) work on the sociocultural nature of learning generated high interest in the role that a more able other (e.g., a caregiver or a peer) might play in facilitating the learning of individual children, while also highlighting the cultural historical context of both knowledge and learning. This sociocultural view of learning directed researchers’ attention to the importance of both the context in which learning occurs and the primacy of the culturally framed social interactions through which learning occurs. Contemporary theories such as Distributed Cognition (Hutchins, 1995, 2006) and the Social Brain hypothesis (Dunbar, 1998) and terms such as shared cognition (Resnick, Levine, & Teasley, 1991) and interthinking (Littleton & Mercer, 2013; Mercer, 2000) continue the expansion of the notion of cognition from a strictly individualistic process to a collective process. As Mercer (2016) noted, “on the one hand, people are able to think collectively; and on the other hand, engagement in such collective activities enables the development of individuals’ thinking” (p. 11). Rather than viewing social and cognitive perspectives of learning as dichotomous, the social constructivist view integrates both perspectives in conceptualising the learning process. Resnick and her colleagues (1991) used the term shared cognition to describe “cognition that is not bounded by the individual brain or mind” (Resnick, 1991, p. 1). Drawing from the work of Vygotsky (1978) and Mead (1934), Resnick asserted that the kinds of interpretative processes available to individuals can be shaped by social experience. Rather than focusing on how individuals think about social phenomena, social processes can be treated as integral to cognition and examined in terms of the way in which people jointly construct knowledge through processes shaped by particular social purposes and interactions. Similarly, Littleton and Mercer (2013) used the term interthink to refer to the way in which people think creatively and productively together (p. 12) and used the term particularly to emphasise the “joint coordinated intellectual activity” (Mercer, 2000, p. 16) that people engage in using language. Littleton and 583

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Mercer argued that thinking collectively is a common and natural part of human life. They suggested that cognitive tools such as theory of mind (a person’s assessment of other people’s thinking and knowledge), metacognition (a person’s reflective awareness and regulation of one’s own thought processes), and co-regulation (a person’s monitoring and adjustment of one’s behaviours according to the actions of others) are important resources for interthinking to occur.The work of Resnick and her colleagues (1991) and Mercer and colleagues (Littleton & Mercer, 2013; Mercer, 2000) provides a useful way for researchers and educational practitioners to think about the interconnectedness of cognitive and social processes. The notions of shared cognition and interthinking highlight the dialectic relationship between individual and social cognitive processes and are consistent with the way in which argumentation and learning in the mathematics classroom have been viewed from a socioconstructivist perspective (cf. D. Clarke, 2001; Cobb & Bauersfeld, 1995). Students become enculturated into the community of practice in the mathematics classroom through exposure to argumentation in a way that is appropriate to the classroom culture. Learning occurs in an indirect way through individuals’ participation in the collective social activity of argumentation, accessing language and cognitive structures made available to them through social interaction. The obligation for students to make their arguments understandable and accountable to others (Krummheuer, 1995) creates the condition for the progressive refinement of intersubjectivity through negotiation with other members of the community and the increased capacity of an individual to participate within that community. We are extending the work of Lave and Wenger (1991) on community of practice by delving down into the constituent activity of individuals carrying out collaborative activities.We are interested in the shared cognitive process occurring through meaning negotiation within the mathematics classroom setting, and we particularly focus our attention on the socio-cognitive aspect of meaning negotiation by identifying indicators of shared cognition. We employ the term socio-cognitive (Van Dijk, 2008) to both acknowledge the fundamentally social nature of human cognition (Mercer, 2016) and also to contest the image of a cognitively bounded individual. Since we are investigating individual contributions to collaborative activities, the language that we require to describe the shared cognitive activity must give recognition to the way in which each of the collaborating individuals contributes to and thereby constitutes the process of collective thought and collaborative activity. Further, given current interest in collaborative thought and practice, a language by which the constituent processes might be described could provide the basis for instructional interventions to promote these constituent processes.We refer to the notion of co-cognition (as employed by Heal, 1998) and propose the terms inter-cognition and intra-cognition to distinguish different kinds of socio-cognitive activity involved during collaborative problem solving. These terms are operationalised using data from the Social Unit of Learning project, which involved student collaborative problem-solving activity in a laboratory classroom. Further information about the project is provided.

The Social Unit of Learning project The Social Unit of Learning project (Chan, Clarke, & Cao, 2017) used the laboratory classroom, the Science of Learning Research Classroom (SLRC), at the University of Melbourne, to examine individual, dyadic, small-group (four to six students) and whole-class problem solving in mathematics and the associated/consequent learning. Intact Year 7 classes from a secondary school in metropolitan Melbourne were recruited with their usual teacher in order to exploit existing student–student and teacher–student interactive norms. Eleven classes of Year 7 students (12 to 13 years old; 264 students in total) participated in the project. Each of the classes partici584

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pated in a 60-minute session in the laboratory classroom as the students completed problemsolving tasks individually, in pairs, and in small groups (4 to 6 students).The laboratory classroom facility was purposefully designed and built to allow simultaneous and continuous documentation of classroom interactions using multiple cameras and microphones. With 10 built-in video cameras and up to 32 audio inputs, the comprehensive and detailed recording of every participant in the classroom offered the possibility for systematic examination of the link between the processes and products of learning activities within the classroom setting. The problem-solving tasks used in the project were drawn from previous research (e.g., D. Clarke & Sullivan, 1990; Sullivan & Clarke, 1991) and were purposefully chosen to make the thinking and/or social processes of the problem-solving activity more visible. The tasks have the characteristics of allowing students to express their thinking through multiple modes (e.g., verbal, graphical, textual, etc.) and approach the task using different strategies or prioritise different forms of knowledge or experience. The resulting data collected in the project included: all written material produced by the students; instructional material used by the teacher; video footage of all of the students during the session; video footage of the teacher tracked throughout the session; transcripts of teacher and student speech based on the video recording; and recording and transcripts of pre- and post-session teacher interviews.

Co-cognition, inter-cognition, and intra-cognition Central to the design of the Social Unit of Learning project was the creation of optimal conditions to study student–student interaction during collaborative problem solving (Chan & Clarke, 2017). The collaborative problem-solving activities encouraged students to articulate their thinking within the laboratory classroom setting.The high-quality video and audio recording of every student in the research facility provided a rich and comprehensive documentation for understanding the socio-cognitive aspect in student–student talk. The term co-cognition has been used by Heal (1998) to describe a person’s capacity to mentally simulate the thoughts of another, akin to the theory of mind (Flavell, 1999). The term can be contrasted with meta-cognition, which refers to thinking about one’s own thinking (Wilson & Clarke, 2004). In examining the data from the Social Unit of Learning project, we found instances of co-cognition when students explicitly tried to understand each other’s perspective. For example, one of the pair tasks that was given to the students was specified as follows: The average age of five people living in a house is 25. One of the five people is a Year 7 student. What are the ages of the other four people and how are the five people in the house related? Write a paragraph explaining your answer. Students Anna and Pandit (pseudonyms; both female) were solving the task, and Anna had drawn five circles on the working-out sheet denoting the five people in the household as specified in the task. She wrote “25” above the middle of the circle, circled that circle, and drew a line linking the number and the middle circle (see Figure 40.1). The pair then had the following conversation (the number denotes speaker turn and // denotes overlapping speech): 47 Anna: 48 Pandit: 49 Anna: 50 Pandit:

Twenty-five. Why are you saying that dude’s 25? They don’t have to be 25. It - it - this one is 25 because that’s the average. Average doesn’t have to - doesn’t mean that one guy has to be 25. 585

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Figure 40.1 Writing by Anna.

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Anna: Oh okay, okay. That makes sense then. Pandit: Altogether it’s 125 because like … Anna: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pandit: And … Anna: Now, I get it. I thought that was //just 25. Pandit: //Yeah, yeah. So one dude’s 13. That means the other four is 112. Anna: What do you mean? No. It can’t - they can’t all be like so equal. Pandit: They’re not. Oh my God. Look, so 25’s one guy, right. No. It’s like for, you know, average means like … Anna: I know, I know. Pandit: Yeah. So 25 times five is the total, right? Anna: Yeah. I know. Pandit: So everyone’s 125. And one guy is 13. Anna: I know, one guy. So …

The conversation between Pandit and Anna suggests that the students had different conceptions of average. For Anna, as shown in her writing, she imagined average to be the middle number among a group of numbers (Turn 25 “… this one is 25 because that’s the average”). Pandit did not agree with Anna (Turn 48 Pandit: “They don’t have to be 25.”) and tried to explain to her that the specification of the average meant that the total of the five numbers had to be 25 times 5 (Turn 52 “Altogether it’s 125 because like … ”). Pandit’s explanation was cut off by Anna’s response (Turn 53 “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”). When Pandit went further to suggest that they could subtract the Year 7 student’s age (13 years) from the total of 125 (Turn 56 “So one dude’s 13. That means the other four is 112.”), Anna appeared to think that Pandit was implying that the other four people had to be of the same age (Turn 57 “No. It can’t - they can’t all be like so equal.”). Her disagreement with Pandit prompted Pandit to trace back Anna’s thinking (Turn 58 Pandit: “Look, so 25’s one guy, right … ”) and to try to explain to her understanding of Anna’s thinking (Turn 58 Pandit: “It’s like for, you know, average means like … ”). Although Pandit’s attempt was cut short by Anna’s response, Pandit’s utterance “it’s like for you” was an obvious indication that Pandit was trying to reflect Anna’s thinking back to her in order to resolve their disagreement. Pandit’s attempt to explain to Anna her own thinking seems to indicate the sociocognitive process that Heal (1998) considered as co-cognition. Anna also appeared to attempt to understand Pandit’s thinking, as evident in her response “What do you mean?” (Turn 57) when she did not follow Pandit’s statement “That means the other four is 112” (Turn 56). Co-cognition can be contrasted with what we have called inter-cognition, which invokes the notion of extending or building upon the thoughts of another without the level of empathic insight presumed by Heal’s (1998) term. We propose that inter-cognition occurs where the expressed thought of one individual stimulates or provides a platform or scaffold for the (further) 586

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Figure 40.2 The written solution of Audrey and Katie.

thought of an interacting individual. There is a fundamental temporality to inter-cognition that is not required for co-cognition. For example, what follows is the conversation between Audrey and Katie (both female) after they have worked out their solution to the same task that Anna and Pandit were attempting. The conversation took place as they were in the process of writing out their final solution (shown in Figure 40.2), with Katie doing the writing. 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

Katie: Let’s write the explanation now. Why did we choose these ages? Audrey: We chose these ages as we wanted a variety (laughs). Katie: We wanted … Audrey: Because they were all just - ah, I just stabbed myself with a pen. No. Does this have to be … Katie and Audrey: (Laughter) Katie: Forty-five, forty-five doesn’t make a variety. Audrey: Just say because we wanted a variety of ages. We know this is correct as … as we have used addition to add them all. Katie: We … Audrey: We used addition to … Katie: No. We can’t say it’s correct because there could be many answers. Audrey: Oh we know this is one of the many answers. Katie: We know … (Laughs). Katie: … the answers. As … Audrey: As we have used addition to add these five numbers up. Katie: No. We used all of them, divide everything, times. Audrey: Subtraction. Division. 587

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99 Katie: 100 Audrey: 101 Katie: 102 Audrey: 103 Katie: 104 Audrey:

Multiplication. And multiplication to make sure our answer is precise. Pretty sure I spelled that wrong (laughs). Pretty sure that’s an “I”. You spell it. To make our answer as precise as it can be.

This excerpt suggested a coordinated way in which Audrey and Katie tried to justify their solution in writing. Katie raised the question “Why did we choose these ages?” (Turn 83), and Audrey responded (“We chose these ages as we wanted a variety …”). Katie pointed out that the choice of two ages of 45 years does not constitute a “variety” (Turn 88), and Audrey responded by assuring her that the wording was fine, and Katie followed by writing the sentence down. Audrey then tried to justify their answer by mentioning that they thought that their answer was correct, but Katie disagreed (Turn 92 “We can’t say it’s correct because there could be many answers”), and Audrey echoed Katie’s point (Turn 93 “Oh we know this is one of the many answers”).There is a coordinated pattern in the way Katie and Audrey operate, where one makes a suggestion and the other person responds by extending or building on the person’s suggestion. Even when there was a disagreement, the disagreement was resolved quickly, either by one person maintaining her stance (e.g.,Turn 89 Audrey: “Just say because we wanted a variety of ages”) or adjusting her stance by matching the stance of the other person (e.g., Turn 93 Audrey: “Oh we know this is one of the many answers”).We suggest that the way in which Katie and Audrey expressed their thoughts and stimulated each other’s thinking for further thought appears to characterise a different type of socio-cognitive activity which we called inter-cognition. Contrasting with inter-cognition, intra-cognition can be seen when two or more people regulate their own collective thinking as a cognising unit. We suggest that intra-cognition can be signalled by the prominence of “we” as the agentic pronoun. Statements that we would characterise as intra-cognitive make reference to, evaluate, or regulate the spoken contributions of all (both) participants in the student talk. In such intra-cognitive exchanges, it is the combined thoughts and associated actions of the dyad that are the subject of the conversation. The conversation excerpts of Anna and Pandit and of Audrey and Katie provide a useful contrast by illustrating the presence (Audrey and Katie) or absence (Anna and Pandit) of intra-cognition. The frequent use of “you” and “I” in the conversation between Anna and Pandit (e.g., Turn 48 Pandit: “Why are you saying … ” [Emphasis added]; Turn 59 Anna: “I know. I know.”) suggests that the two students were not thinking of themselves as a single unit or attempting to regulate their collective activity. Audrey and Katie, on the other hand, used the pronoun “we” a lot more frequently compared to the former pair in the excerpt (e.g.,Turn 83 Katie: “Why did we choose these ages?”; Turn 100 Audrey: “… to make sure our answer is precise …”). The use of the pronouns “I” and “you” appeared in statements regarding individual actions (e.g., Turn 86 Audrey: “ah, I just stabbed myself with a pen”; Turn 101 Katie: “Pretty sure I spelled that wrong.”) and signalled delegation of individual responsibility within the collaborating dyad (Turn 103 Katie: “You spell it.”). The use of “we” accords the dyad status both as a social unit and as the principal cognising entity.

Connecting shared cognition with dialogic processes So far in this chapter, we have examined the interconnections between social and cognitive activity without invoking notions of “dialogue” or “dialogic.” Nonetheless, there appears to be a lot of similarities and overlaps between the various dialogic perspectives (Alexander, 2018; 588

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Lefstein & Snell, 2014) and the conceptualisation of student learning in the mathematics classroom presented in this chapter, where both drew from the same literature base (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978). When discussing the premise behind dialogic education,Wegerif (2006) argued that the end goal or purpose of education should not be about acquiring facts or knowledge but about how to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct knowledge through communication. The terms dialogue and dialogic are used in a very specific way in the sense of facilitating and considering multiple voices and perspectives through communicative acts (e.g., speech and writing) to create shared meaning and to explore new meanings (Lefstein & Snell, 2014; Mercer & Sams, 2006; Wegerif, 2006). Different dialogic perspectives may emphasise different aspects of dialogue (Lefstein & Snell, 2014), such as inquiry (Alexander, 2006; Wegerif, 2006), thinking together (Littleton & Mercer, 2013), or logical reasoning and argumentation (S. Clarke, Resnick, & Rosé, 2016). For some, dialogue is considered as “a form of human learning” (S. Clarke et al., 2016, p. 378), where learning is conceptualised as “appropriating the voices of others, taking them into our own store of voices by giving them our own accent and our own associations and resonances” (Wegerif, 2006, p. 59). Dialogue and learning are therefore integral to each other if not synonymous within some dialogic perspectives. Similar to these dialogic perspectives, the conceptualisation of classroom learning as progressively enhanced participation within a community of practice through immersion within the discourse of the community (Lave & Wenger, 1991) both emphasises the importance of language and the social construction of meaning in the learning process. Learners are seen as active and agentic in their involvement in the community as they negotiate and renegotiate their understanding of the subject matter and the social conventions shared by the community. The focus on the negotiation of meaning as the mechanism for learning suggests a two-way conversation, i.e., a dialogue, driven by the human desire to achieve intersubjectivity (Cobb & Bauersfeld, 1995). Instead of characterising the student conversations quoted in this chapter as indicative of cocognitive, inter-cognitive, and intra-cognitive activity, the same conversations can also be examined using the categories of exploratory talk (talk that indicates co-ordinated joint reasoning), disputational talk (defensive and uncooperative talk), and cumulative talk (talk that builds on each other’s ideas in an uncritical but mutually supportive way) as suggested by Mercer (2000). Anna and Pandit’s conversation appears to move between exploratory and disputational talk where the students sometimes questioned each other’s ideas (exploratory) while other times cut off the other person’s explanation prematurely (disputational). Katie and Audrey, in contrast, seem to be generally engaged in cumulative talk without extensive questioning of each other’s reasoning. We want to stress that the terms co-cognitive, inter-cognitive, and intra-cognitive are not describing forms of “talk” but rather the thought processes that might be associated with particular forms of talk. For example, exploratory talk, as described by Mercer (2000), may signify intra-cognition, while cumulative talk may signify inter-cognition. Disputational talk signals the absence of co-cognition, inter-cognition, or intra-cognition, lacking the convergence of shared purpose, activity, and thought conducive to constructing and sustaining intersubjectivity and productive collaborative activity. We see our account as complementary to Mercer’s framework, offering different but related insights and emphases. By distinguishing student–student talk in terms of co-cognitive, inter-cognitive, and intra-cognitive activity, we are highlighting socio-cognitive aspects of the meaning-negotiation process, rather than the type of socially performed reasoning evident in the dyadic interaction according to Mercer’s categorisation. We postulate that these different kinds of socio-cognitive activity are useful to understand students’ evolving intersubjectivity during collaborative work as students each think about the other person’s thinking (co-cognitive); build on each other’s thinking (inter-cognitive); and regulate 589

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their collective thinking as a single cognising unit (intra-cognitive). Our categorisation focuses less on the nature of the argumentation and reasoning and more on the form of intersubjectivity achieved during student–student talk through indicators of shared cognition. In terms of teaching implications, we share the same educational aspiration with dialogic perspectives in terms of encouraging students’ active participation in and regulation of their own learning.We believe the socio-cognitive aspect of meaning negotiation that we have highlighted and elaborated describes ways in which students reflect on and regulate their shared thinking with others. These distinctions suggest guiding questions that might assist students to monitor and reflect on their interactions with others during collaborative work. Such questions might include: “Do I understand the other person’s perspective?” (co-cognitive); “Are we building on each other’s ideas?” (inter-cognitive); and “Are we thinking as a team or as separate individuals?” (intra-cognitive). These questions should complement the practices of classrooms that already employ a dialogic teaching approach which encourages communication, questioning, inquiry, reasoning, collaboration, and student empowerment (c.f., Alexander, 2018; Lefstein & Snell, 2014; Phillipson & Wegerif, 2017).

Conclusion Through examining the socio-cognitive aspect of meaning negotiation, we have found useful connections between dialogic perspectives and our socio-constructivist view of classroom learning.We see the perspective on classroom learning presented in this chapter as complementary to the dialogic perspective in the emphasis it places on the problem-solving dyad’s reciprocal and joint construction of their thought processes. Distinguishing between different kinds of sociocognitive activity (co-cognitive, inter-cognitive, and intra-cognitive) foregrounds the mediating role of intersubjectivity as we (the authors) conceptualise it during the meaning−negotiation process. We argue that effective collaborative problem solving requires anticipating differences in each other’s thought processes. Teachers and students would benefit from re-orienting their attention to the individual’s capacity to model each other’s thought processes during student collaborative problem solving and classroom learning in general.

Acknowledgements This research was conducted with Science of Learning Research Centre funding provided by the Australian Research Council Special Initiatives Grant (SR120300015) and the Discovery Projects funding scheme (DP170102541).We would like to thank the students, parents, teachers, and school staff for their invaluable support of this project.

References Alexander, R. J. (2006). Towards Dialogic Teaching: Rethinking Classroom Talk (3rd edn). Thirsk: Dialogos. Alexander, R. J. (2018). Developing dialogic teaching: Genesis, process, trial. Research Papers in Education, 1–38. doi:10.1080/02671522.2018.1481140 Barwell, R. (2012). Discursive demands and equity in second language mathematics classrooms. In B. Herbel-Eisenmann, J. Choppin, D. Wagner & D. Pimm (Eds.), Equity in Discourse for Mathematics Education:Theories, Practices, and Policies (pp. 147–163). Dordrecht: Springer. Brousseau, G. (1986). Fondements et méthodes de la didactique des mathématiques. Recherches en didactique des mathématiques, 7(2), 33–115. Chan, M. C. E., & Clarke, D. J. (2017). Structured affordances in the use of open-ended tasks to facilitate collaborative problem solving. ZDM-The International Journal on Mathematics Education, 49, 951–963.

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Dialogue and shared cognition Chan, M. C. E., Clarke, D. J., & Cao, Y. (2017). The social essentials of learning: An experimental investigation of collaborative problem solving and knowledge construction in mathematics classrooms in Australia and China. Mathematics Education Research Journal, 30(1), 39–50. Clarke, D. J. (2001). Untangling uncertainty, negotiation and intersubjectivity. In D. Clarke (Ed.), Perspectives on Practice and Meaning in Mathematics and Science Classrooms (pp. 33–52). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Clarke, D. J., & Sullivan, P. (1990). Is a question the best answer? Australian Mathematics Teacher, 46(3), 30–33. Clarke, S. N., Resnick, L. B., & Rosé, C. P. (2016). Dialogic instruction: A new frontier. In L. Corno & E. M. Anderman (Eds.), Handbook of Educational Psychology (3rd edn, pp. 378–389). New York: Routledge. Cobb, P., & Bauersfeld, H. (1995). The Emergence of Mathematical Meaning: Interaction in Classroom Cultures. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Dunbar, R. I. M. (1998). The social brain hypothesis. Evolutionary Anthropology, 6(5), 178–190. Flavell, J. H. (1999). Cognitive development: Children’s knowledge about the mind. Annual Review of Psychology, 50(1), 21–45. Heal, J. (1998). Co-cognition and off-line simulation: Two ways of understanding the simulation approach. Mind and Language, 13(4), 477–498. Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hutchins, E. (2006). The distributed cognition perspective on human interaction. In N. J. Enfield & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of Human Sociality: Culture, Cognition and Interaction (pp. 375–398). New York: Berg. Krummheuer, G. (1995). The ethnography of argumentation. In P. Cobb & H. Bauersfeld (Eds.), The Emergence of Mathematical Meaning: Interaction in Classroom Cultures (pp. 229–269). Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lefstein, A., & Snell, J. (2014). Better than Best Practice: Developing Teaching and Learning Through Dialogue. London: Routledge. Lerman, S. (2001). Accounting for accounts of learning mathematics: Reading the ZPD in videos and transcripts. In D. Clarke (Ed.), Perspectives on Practice and Meaning in Mathematics and Science Classrooms (pp. 53–74). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Littleton, K., & Mercer, N. (2013). Interthinking: Putting Talk to Work. Abingdon: Routledge. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mercer, N. (2000). Words and Minds: How We Use Language to Think Together. London: Routledge. Mercer, N. (2016). Education and the social brain: Linking language, thinking, teaching and learning. Education & Didactique, 2(10), 9–23. Mercer, N., & Howe, C. (2012). Explaining the dialogic processes of teaching and learning: The value and potential of sociocultural theory. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 1(1), 12–21. Mercer, N., & Sams, C. (2006). Teaching children how to use language to solve maths problems. Language and Education, 20(6), 507–528. Palincsar, A. S. (1998). Social constructivist perspectives on teaching and learning. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 345–375. Phillipson, N., & Wegerif, R. (2017). Dialogic Education: Mastering Core Concepts Through Thinking Together. London: Routledge. Resnick, L. B. (1991). Shared cognition: Thinking as social practice. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine & S. D. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition (pp. 1–20). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Resnick, L. B., Levine, J. M., & Teasley, S. D. (Eds.). (1991). Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition.Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context. New York: Oxford University Press. Sfard, A., Forman, E., & Kieran, C. (2001). Learning discourse: Sociocultural approaches to research in mathematics education. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 46(1/3), 1–12. Sullivan, P., & Clarke, D. J. (1991). Communication in the Classroom: The Importance of Good Questioning. Geelong: Deakin University Press. Toulmin, S. (2003). The Uses of Argument (Updated ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1958.)

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David Clarke and Man Ching Esther Chan Van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Discourse and Context: A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wegerif, R. (2006). Dialogic education: What is it and why do we need it? Education Review, 19(2), 58–66. Wilson, J., & Clarke, D. (2004). Towards the modelling of mathematical metacognition. Mathematics Education Research Journal, 16(2), 25–48.

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SECTION VII

Dialogic education for transformative purposes

DIALOGIC EDUCATION FOR TRANSFORMATIVE PURPOSES Farah Ahmed and Hilary Cremin

A number of key themes recur throughout the chapters in this section, namely: dialogue across time and space; dialogue across differences, including between and within individuals; dialogue in presence and in absence; dialogue about principles, ethics and values; principles, values and ethics of dialogue; dialogue that is affective, contextual, community driven; and dialogue for establishing truth, for self-reflection and for understanding others’ perspectives. Ultimately, these strands coalesce in the study of educational dialogue for transformative purposes, both for individuals and for societies. This is not a simple process, however, and these strands within the chapters in this section stand in dialogue with each other, as well as with the rest of the book and with the literature more generally. Grossen and Muller Mirza examine the impact of students’ experiences outside of schools on teaching and learning within schools. They differentiate between dialogue in presence and in absence, by considering the ways that distant voices from the past can merge with students’ discourse and generate ‘dialogical tensions’ within education for cultural diversity. Likewise, Cremin and Tsuruhara consider cultures of schooling and the ways in which power operates to silence some voices whilst privileging others. They show how conversational analysis can support the study of dialogue through analysis of features such as silence, overlaps and the tone/ loudness of utterances. These conversational features assist in understanding turning points in conflict-laden dialogue, as well as missed opportunities and the ways in which transformational moments can occur in everyday situations. Higham and Hans De-Vynck argue that a dialogic theory of ethics and agency can support responsible leadership among students and facilitate relationships of care amongst learners.They investigate the ways in which relationships of care can emerge when teachers focus on ethics and agency in mixed-age, rather than single-age, form groups.They document how this practice develops students’ communication skills and agency around sensitive topics and how it can lead to emotional breakthroughs for students. And yet dialogue must allow for, acknowledge and facilitate difference, in order to generate understanding of the other. Ben David Kolikant and Pollack examine the aim of dialogue in collaborative educational practices, proposing Bakhtin’s notion of ‘internally persuasive discourse’ as an alternative aim to the more established idea of ‘convergence’. They argue that convergence is not helpful within the fraught context of Arab–Israeli intercultural educational dialogue; rather an alternative ‘dynamic epistemology’, which has learner agency at its centre, is needed. Ahmed 595

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also refers to the need to recognise difference, even when that may not be visible. She brings the validity of non-Western epistemologies and dialogic practice in non-Western pedagogical traditions into the dialogue of this handbook. She briefly outlines ‘convergence’ between familiar theories of educational dialogue and dialogic concepts in Islamic educational theories and practices, through a case study of a traditional Islamic pedagogy known as halaqah. She shows how halaqah is being used in British Islamic faith-schools to provide young Muslims with the dialogic space and opportunity to reflect on how they navigate their faith in a secular context. Her chapter raises questions of inclusivity within and across cultures. Inclusive practices are at the core of Flecha’s programme, which supports community participation in state-funded schools, for example through the use of ‘Interactive Groups’ in the Spanish example reported on in this chapter. Like the other authors in this section, Flecha recognises that voices in dialogues arise from specific contexts and that any dialogue is ontologically framed by its context. His work is about valuing dialogue between school knowledge and community/family knowledge and using known figures and family members as facilitators of dialogic learning in classrooms. Flecha’s research argues that a dialogic approach can transform classrooms into inclusive and democratic spaces, a claim taken up with more caution in the final chapter. The final chapter in this section, and indeed this handbook, deliberates more fully on the relationship between educational dialogue in schools and the strength of democratic societies’ resilience to the challenges of a post-truth world. For Alexander high-quality dialogic talk must be ‘the object of learning as well as its medium’, with some place in the curriculum for students to understand the transformative power of oracy skills and dialogic values. Only through such meta-awareness will students develop their voice in a manner that is necessary for democracies to flourish and for power to be held to account. However, to actually embed these values, schools will need to recognise that students bring alternative epistemologies into classrooms, whether cultural, philosophical or personal. To conclude, we posit that the values of dialogue are perhaps best placed to mediate conflicting voices and epistemologies in a globalised post-truth world.

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41 INTERACTIONS AND DIALOGUE IN EDUCATION Dialogical tensions as resources or obstacles Michèle Grossen and Nathalie Muller Mirza

Dialogic education has a long history going back to the 1970s and has different theoretical backgrounds. In Piaget’s aftermath, researchers first aimed at testing the influence of social interactions on development and learning.They did so through quasi-experimental designs that measured the outcomes of group work and tried to account for the interaction processes most likely to foster development and learning. Under Vygotsky’s growing influence, studies were then mainly carried out in “natural” settings, particularly schools. Quasi-experimental designs were gradually abandoned in favour of analyses of teacher–students interactions dealing with curricular subject matters. In what can be seen as a linguistic turn, research began to be more sensitive to language, drawing on the sciences of language to expand both theory and methodology. More recently, under the increasing influence of Bakhtin’s theory and its contemporary proponents, research took a new turn by focusing on the dialogical tensions between various situations and voices. Today, research is very much focused on the development of educational practices that encourage learners to adopt an active and reflexive stance. Drawing on recent developments in sociocultural psychology (e.g., Tartas et al., 2010), this chapter has four goals. The first is to show how the interaction processes involved in teachinglearning situations have been investigated and to outline three main conceptions of interaction. Drawing on a dialogical definition of dialogue adapted from Bakhtin (1975/1981), the second goal is to present a dialogical approach to teaching-learning processes and to introduce the concept of dialogical tensions. The third is to illustrate how dialogical tensions shape teachinglearning processes by presenting some results taken from a study on education for cultural diversity. This leads us, in the fourth section, to discuss the researchers’ ethical responsibility for the educational practices and interventions they prescribe and to underline the importance of the context in which data are collected.

Studying teaching-learning processes: Theoretical and methodological challenges Considering the evolution of research into social interactions and learning brings out a striking observation: the term “interaction” has been largely substituted with that of “dialogue”.The latter, however, is so filled with ambiguity (Hennessy et al., 2016; Phillipson & Wegerif, 2017) that 597

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the three definitions of interaction we present could be called “dialogue”. A way to face this issue is to return to the definition of the term “interaction”. A first definition of interaction can be traced back to Lewin’s pioneering work on group processes (Lewin, 1939/1951). According to this author, “a group is a dynamic whole based on interdependence rather than on similarity” (1948, p. 184). Lewin’s definition underscored the interdependency and reciprocity of social interactions, assuming that each individual action results from the other participants’ action. From this definition, Bales (1950) developed a coding scheme to analyse group interactions. His coding method consisted in assigning a certain meaning to each member’s action, assuming that this action is related to the partners’ preceding action. For example, an action is likely to be coded as “gives an opinion” if it follows the action “asks for an opinion”. This coding scheme shows the contribution of each participant and also provides a profile of the group interaction. Coding schemes thence became a widespread method used in various fields of psychology. Some of them are now very complex as they try to articulate several dimensions (cognitive, emotional, behaviour, etc.). This methodology has several advantages. First, it provides an account of various processes involved in an interaction situation, from cognitive dimensions to relational and emotional ones. Second, when implemented in a pretest–post-test design, it pertains to “process-product-studies” (Kumpulainen & Mutanen, 1999) and allows for quantification. Third, it can be applied to a large corpus of data and, on some conditions, allows intergroup or longitudinal comparisons. However, there is a sort of contradiction between the theoretical definition of interaction as interdependence and the methodology used to analyse it. In fact, by subdividing interaction into individual actions, these coding systems do not fully account for what the participants do together (Marková & Linell, 1996). Moreover, by resorting to predetermined categories, they neglect the multiple meanings that can be given to an action and do not tackle the participants’ own reciprocal interpretations. As it also faces difficulties in accounting for the sequentiality of an interaction, that is, the position of each individual contribution with respect to the preceding and to the next possible ones, this methodology is often complemented with a qualitative analysis of one or more excerpts illustrating how the participants’ contributions are tied together, that is, interdependent. The second definition also assumes that interaction means interdependence but builds on the development of discourse and conversation analysis to fully acknowledge this.Viewed as a single unit of analysis, interaction is mainly defined as a co-construction leading to a joint accomplishment (Marková & Linell, 1996) and resulting in a specific discursive space (Salazar Orvig, 1999). The activity in which the participants are involved, and which shapes their interactions, and sequentiality are the main elements of this definition.What is under study is the “architecture of intersubjectivity” (Rommetveit, 1976), that is, the gradual construction of states of intersubjectivity leading the participants to assume that mutual understanding is reached (see also Gillespie & Cornish, 2009). In their discussion on the notion of interaction, Marková and Linell (1996) talk about “dialogical interactions” to refer to this conception of interaction, as opposed to “individual acts” falling under the first definition. Here, the term “dialogical” draws on theories of communication which, in line with Mead (1934/1967), consider that an interaction consists of the participant A’s anticipation of the anticipation of participant B, which implies that an individual action contains that of the other. The methodology built on this definition is vast and heterogeneous. One method consists of looking for types of discourse that bring about learning. In this line, Mercer and his colleagues (e.g., Mercer, 2000; Mercer & Wegerif, 1999) identified three main types of discourse (exploratory talk, cumulative talk and disputational talk), demonstrated the efficiency of exploratory talk (at least in some types of tasks) and developed an educational programme (“Thinking Together”) to teach exploratory talk (Dawes, Mercer & Wegerif, 2000; Littleton & 598

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Mercer, 2013; Muller Mirza, 2016; Wegerif et al., 2005). Other methods rely on various types of discourse analysis, some inspired by Conversation Analysis (e.g., Pekarek Doehler & PochonBerger, 2009). Still others resort to specific theories, such as Illocutionary Logic (Trognon, Batt & Marchetti, 2011) or Argumentation Theory (Greco Morasso, 2011, 2013), to provide finegrained analyses of the socio-discursive processes through which reasoning or argumentation is achieved (e.g., Goldberg & Schwarz, 2016; Muller Mirza & Perret-Clermont, 2009). In recent years, more emphasis has been placed on the multimodality of interactions, in order to analyse complex situations where nonverbal communication and materiality are crucial, notably in the use of digital technologies (Fenwick, 2010; Ligorio, Loperfido & Spadaro, 2013; Mäkitalo, Linell & Säljö, 2017). On a methodological level, this approach faces some difficulties. First, it is difficult to apply to long-term interactions. It is then less suitable (or not at all) to quantification and makes comparison between situations more difficult. According to Wegerif (2016), the illustrative use of data makes it difficult to demonstrate the fruitfulness of some education methods over others. Second, it generally tends to emphasise discourse and interpersonal relationships, with the risk of overlooking the cognitive processes at work in an interaction. Third, it tends to neglect the issue of power relationships. Fourth, by focusing on the here and now of an interaction, it tends to isolate the situation under study from the broader contexts in which it takes place, thus ignoring the participants’ personal, social and institutional history and treating them as “subjects”, rather than social actors. Our conceptualisation of the notion of interaction thus needs to take these broader contexts into account. This is precisely what the third definition of interaction tries to achieve. To introduce this definition, let us refer to Latour’s (1996) comparison between simian and human interactions. A first difference, Latour writes, is that human interactions are framed interactions, meaning that: “something prevents human interaction from proliferating outside and from being interfered with inside by all the other partners” (p. 230). As an example, Latour notes that when we are “at the counter buying a postage stamp and talking into the speaking grill” (p. 233), we do not talk about our family, neither does the server talk about personal matters. A second difference concerns the non-simultaneity of space and time in human interactions: For the latter, it is very difficult to obtain the simultaneity in space and time […]. We say […] that we engage in “face-to-face” interactions. Indeed we do, but the clothing that we are wearing comes from elsewhere and was manufactured a long time ago; the words we use were not formed for this occasion; the walls we have been leaning on were designed by an architect for a client, and constructed by workers-people who are absent today, although their action continues to make itself felt. The very person we are addressing is a product of a history that goes far beyond the framework of our relationship. (p. 231) According to Latour, listing all those who somehow take part in an interaction is impossible. He concludes that an interaction has a contradictory form since it is both a framework and a network: the framework puts boundaries to an interaction, whereas the network links the present time and space of an interaction with other times and spaces. This conception focuses attention on the there and then of an interaction and raises a major theoretical and methodological challenge: accounting for the relationships between situations located in different spaces and times (Silseth & Arnseth, 2011; Zittoun & Gillespie, 2016). Considering a teaching-learning situation both as a framework and a network prompts us to consider students as social actors who learn both 599

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inside and outside the school and have constructed both social and personal meanings of the topics they learn at school. On a theoretical level, concepts such as those of chronotope (Kumpulainen, Mikkola & Jaatinen, 2014), boundaries and (dis)continuity (Bronkhorst & Akkerman, 2016) or dialogical tensions (Grossen, Zittoun & Ros, 2012; Linell, 2003; Zittoun, & Grossen, 2013) aim at theori­ sing these complex networks.Various methods have been developed in order to account for the there and then of the present situation, its heterogeneity, polysemy, as well as for the multimodality and materiality of interactions (Kumpulainen, Kajamaa & Rajala, 2019), for example: (a) mixed methods mingle, for example, participant observation, interviews with local informants, documentary analysis (e.g., Rajala et al., 2013) or case studies (e.g., Penuel et al., 2016; Zittoun, 2017) in order to provide various perspectives on a given situation; (b) learning processes are observed inside the school, out of the school or across situations (Bronkhorst & Akkerman, 2016) and also include the use of blended teaching which mixes face-to-face teaching with online digital teaching (Ligorio, Loperfido & Spadaro, 2013); (c) teaching-learning situations focus on topics strongly related to societal debates, such as socio-scientific issues (Mäkitalo, Jakobsson & Säljö, 2009) or education for cultural diversity (Muller Mirza, 2012) or projects that have a political relevance (Rajala et al., 2013); (d) the boundaries of the school are crossed, and teaching-learning situations are set up outside the classroom, for example in environment education (Renshaw & Tooth, 2018). These innovative methods still face many challenges. First, as they put emphasis on teaching-learning situations as a network, they have to determine what should be included in the observation or not. Second, when they use mixed methodology, their challenge is to link various results together within a comprehensive framework. Third, they might give more emphasis to the outcomes of observed or designed educational settings in order to orientate educational practices. Within this line of research, we drew on Bakhtin (e.g., 1934/1981) to develop a sociocultural and dialogical approach to teaching-learning processes that allows, among other things, to consider the “network dimension” of an interaction.

A sociocultural and dialogical approach to teaching-learning processes at school Bakhtin’s theory has been a major source of inspiration in sociocultural psychology (e.g., Wertsch, 1991), leading Marková (2003, 2016) to state that dialogism is not only a theory but also an epistemological and ontological stance, which conceives the Other both as a “real” Other and an inner characteristic of the human mind (e.g., Linell, 2009; Marková, 2003;Wegerif, 2013). However, Bakhtin (1934/1981) did not study social interactions but developed a literary theory underpinned by a certain theory of language. According to him, language is “living word” and is transformed through its use by concrete speakers in concrete situations. It is part of a dialogical chain that echoes the “voices” of absent and former speakers’ “voices”. As a historical development of previous discourse, any utterance echoes other discourses. It takes on the “dialogical overtones” of previous discourse (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 93) but also creates new meanings when it is used in another context. Any utterance is a dialogue between various voices and is characterised by an “internal dialogism” (Bakhtin, 1934/1981, p. 279): Within the arena of almost every utterance an intense interaction and struggle between one’s own and another’s word is being waged, a process in which they oppose or dialogically interanimate each other. (Bakhtin, 1934/1981, p. 354) 600

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As this quotation shows, internal dialogism entails “dialogical relationships” (Bakhtin, 1984), that is, minimal differences, contradictions or oppositions between the various voices making up any discourse. When applied to face-to-face interactions, his theory then needs to be adapted (Grossen & Salazar Orvig, 2011a, 2011b) in order to account both for co-construction processes that are the core of the second definition of interaction and for internal dialogism of language. Drawing on François (2005; see also Salazar Orvig, 2005), we made a distinction between dialogue in presence and dialogue in absence (or distant dialogues), in order to account for the distant voices that pervade discourse and for the indirect participation of absent third parties. Defining teaching-learning situations as communication situations between a teacher and one or more learners who focus on a given subject matter in a given setting (Psaltis, Gillepsie & Perret-Clermont, 2015), we assumed that this dialogue in presence, that is, the here and now of the situation (Rommetveit, 1976) is doubled by a dialogue in absence.Thus, the notion of dialogue was expanded to account for the there and then of the situation. This amounts to considering that: (1) the setting chosen by the teacher is inspired by absent third parties, such as the didactic methods and materials designed by educational specialists (Muller Mirza et al., 2007) or his or her previous experience; (2) the subject matter results from a historical development of knowledge, has social meanings and has undergone various didactic transformations in order to be taught. It also has personal meanings (Lawrence & Valsiner, 2003; Zittoun, 2006) for the students, teachers and their respective social circles; (3) the teacher and students are social actors who experience various social situations outside school, have personal life trajectories and have knowledge, skills and practices that may or may not be relevant in the school context.They therefore engage part of their social and personal identity (or I-position; e.g., de Abreu & Hale, 2009; Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010) in their role of teacher or learner. From this standpoint, a teaching-learning situation can be defined as a heterogeneous dialogical space, where a present situation echoes other situations and where present dialogues echo distant dialogues, resulting in dialogical tensions, that is, differences, discrepancies or conflicts between various voices and situations.To link this with Latour’s definition discussed previously, we might say that dialogical tensions are expressions of the contradiction between interaction as a framework and interaction as a network. The relation between scientific and spontaneous (or everyday) concepts, which was extensively discussed by Vygotsky (1934/1986), can be seen as one of these dialogical tensions. According to Vygotsky, scientific concepts arise out of spontaneous concepts and, once developed, reconfigure these spontaneous concepts. For example, understanding the scientific concept “brother” as a complex system of family relationships modifies children’s understanding of the notion of “sibling”. Hence, there is both continuity and discontinuity (i.e., a rupture) between spontaneous and scientific concepts: the former support the development of the latter which, in turn, transform individuals’ relationships with their everyday experience. Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of secondary speech genre (Bakhtin, 1986), French researchers (e.g., Bautier, 2005; Bautier & Rayou, 2009; Bonnéry, 2015; Jaubert, Rebière & Bernié, 2004; Rochex & Crinon, 2011) recently proposed the notion of secondarisation to refer to the reconfiguration required to move from an everyday understanding of a concept to a scientific one. Through classroom observations, Bonnéry (2015), for instance, provided many examples showing that some teaching-learning settings that use topics that are close to everyday situations (hence, aiming at facilitating the continuity between spontaneous and scientific concepts), paradoxically, bring about socio-cognitive misunderstandings, that is, misalignments between the teacher’s expectations (which are to support learning) and the student’s interpretation of the task (which is limited to its everyday meaning). Hence, we cannot simply assume that the 601

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closer a teaching-learning setting is to everyday situations, the easier secondarisation is (see also Pramling & Säljö, 2014). To put it differently, we might say that such pedagogical settings create dialogical tensions that do not necessarily support learning. In the next section, we illustrate how dialogical tensions can be identified in lessons of education for cultural diversity, and discuss the conditions under which they lead to secondarisation.

Dialogical tensions in the classroom: Some observations The data have been collected in a research project called “Transformation of Emotions and Construction of Knowledge: Identity in Classroom Practices in Intercultural Education” (TECS), which focused on the schools’ new concerns for “real-world issues” (Åberg, Mäkitalo & Säljö, 2010). In Switzerland, as in many parts of the world, objects to be treated as curricular subject matters have changed over the years. Some of them are expected to promote the participation of young people in post-modern societies characterised by digital technologies, globalisation and international migrations. In this view, teaching-learning situations should bring societal issues into schools and deal with socially significant problems that matter to students (Mäkitalo et al., 2009). However, discussing “real-world issues” at school does not simply aim at encouraging the students to express their opinions or feelings but at enabling them to transform their spontaneous concepts into scientific ones. As topics related to cultural diversity raise issues such as racism or discrimination, which are emotionally loaded both in societal debates and in individual trajectories, they seem to be good candidates to evidence dialogical tensions between different voices and situations, and to examine the conditions under which these tensions lead to secondarisation. The TECS project was carried out in 12 classrooms in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, with the voluntary participation of 12 teachers and their students (n = 232). Six taught in primary schools (eleven- to twelve-year-old students) and six in lower secondary schools (thirteen- to fourteen-year-old students). They agreed to set up teaching-learning situations based on two pedagogical documents dealing with education for cultural diversity. The lessons designed by the teachers (85 videotaped and transcribed lessons) were observed by a researcher. The transcripts of the classrooms’ interactions were coded. We identified “episodes” in which either a student or the teacher contributed a personal experience to the discussion. We identified 195 episodes, which were then analysed with the aim of understanding whether a transformation of everyday concepts into scientific concepts (i.e., secondarisation) had occurred, whether there were other dialogical tensions and how they were managed. The first observation we gained from this analysis was that a large proportion of the lessons focused on personal experience. The teachers often initiated episodes with questions such as “What touched you when you looked at this picture?”, “Are you from a migrant family?” or “Can you tell us the story of your family when they arrived in Switzerland?”. On many occasions, the teachers encouraged their students to relate the topics discussed in the lesson with situations experienced outside school, such as their personal experience, their family trajectory or their feelings. In so doing, they invited the students to let in voices that are only occasionally echoed in teaching-learning situations. In these cases, students were not only viewed as learners but also as individuals and social actors involved in other personal, social and cultural situations. As regards secondarisation, analysis of these episodes showed that the teachers dealt with the links the students made with their personal experience or emotions in three main modes. In the first, the teacher focused throughout on the personal or emotional content contributed by the students. Although these episodes did not introduce any breach in the continuity between 602

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everyday and scientific concepts, they did result in the blurring, and even obliteration, of what could have been an object of learning, as Excerpt 1 illustrates (see Appendix for the norms of transcription).

Excerpt 1 (13- to 14-year-old students) The students’ task is to choose one picture from a set of pictures related to the theme of migration and to comment on it. 1

Sabine er Sara chose this picture because: (([…])) she thinks it’s not fair that some people have to live like that while we have comfortable lives here. and says that they have to search hard to find water, food and everything./ 2 Teacher ok 3 Sabine it means that she was also in just such a country and that she was not. 4 Teacher she she’ 5 Sabine she was not as poor 6 Teacher ok, so it has: 7 Sara it hurts me actually (with an embarrassed smile) 8 Teacher it hurts you to see this picture, ok. thank you. yes’ / show us the picture too, so everybody can see it In response to Sabine’s report of Sara’s personal narrative, the teacher simply proposed a reformulation and quickly brought the episode to a close. She did not take advantage of this personal narrative to help the student work out her personal experience from a different perspective, give it a meaning that extends beyond her singularity and becomes an experience that other persons could share. In other words, the teacher did not create the links that could have brought about secondarisation. We cannot know why she did so, although one possible explanation is the closeness to the student’s personal experience and the emotions that it might have triggered. The second mode in which the teachers dealt with the students’ personal experience and emotions consisted in adding factual information to their personal memories or feelings, for example historical facts when a student said that a picture reminded him of the migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean that he saw on TV. In contrast to the first mode, the teachers’ formulations brought about a breach with the students’ personal contributions but also resulted in a failure to acknowledge the students’ personal experience and emotions. The third mode in which the teachers worked with the students’ personal contributions consisted in articulating personal and collective experiences, thereby giving the students an opportunity to perceive that their personal experience was shared by others, as illustrated in Excerpt 2.

Excerpt 2 (11- to 12-year-old students) The teacher asks the students to describe a picture representing destroyed houses. Barbara recalls a visit to her parents’ home country, Bosnia: 22 Barbara er last year well we went er: in in to Bosnia and we went to a place and my father’s brother he had begun to XX and then the war came and then actually there only the ground was left, actually there were just foundations, 23 Teacher yeah but actually it- he doesn’t want to it, it’s a memory for them, sure of course I understand they don’t want to destroy it indeed, but you 603

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know in countries at war er: almost every time when there are countries at war people keep buildings as a memory. as a memory people keep pieces of walls, people keep er buildings that were very important/ remains of a synagogue or remains of a church or remains of a mosque just so that people will remember/ quite true, that’s right […] The teacher’s contribution shifts from Barbara’s personal and unique experience towards a more general and collective experience, what we called elsewhere a move from unicity to generi­ city (Muller Mirza, Grossen, de Diesbach-Dolder & Nicollin, 2014). However, analysis of these episodes showed that in such cases, the students did not engage in very much of a discussion. During our presence in school, we also made several informal observations suggesting that talking about socially sensitive issues and disclosing aspects of one’s private life may have unanticipated side effects. Let us report three observations that illustrate the kind of dialogical tensions that the discourse held in the classroom elicited. The first observation was made at the end of a lesson in which the students had to define the word “migration”. After the break, Francklin (a 12-year-old student) complained to the teacher that his mates called him a “migrant”. Whereas in the classroom, the words “migration” and “migrants” referred to persons moving from one living place to another (be it within the same country or across countries), Francklin interpreted “migrant” as an insult. A possible explanation for this is that, in reference to everyday knowledge and widespread media discourse, he associated the term with people coming from Third-World countries or fleeing the war, thus with poverty and lack of resources. Present dialogues conflicted with distant dialogues in which the notion of migration sometimes has negative connotations, leading Francklin to fear being judged by his classmates. Furthermore, we cannot exclude the possibility that his classmates actually played with the polysemy of the term. The second observation occurred at the beginning of an exercise in which the teacher asked her students (13- to 14-year-olds) to write down their personal trajectory, their life story. One of the students called the teacher and whispered that she would not complete the exercise because she did not want her life to be exposed to the other students (notably the fact that she was an adopted child). Here again, a dialogical tension arose between migration interpreted by the teacher as diversity in social and individual trajectories (hence as a richness) and the students’ personal experience. The third observation was made in a task in which the students were asked to describe a picture representing two men, one black-skinned, the other white-skinned, hugging each other. In this context, the concepts “black” and “white” referred to socio-political and historical events and the teacher’s aim was to lead the students to deconstruct probable stereotypes. One student silently pointed to Rebecca, a classmate. As the teacher questioned his gesture, he answered: “It’s like Rebecca she’s black too”. Here again, the scientific focus of the lesson entered into distant dialogue with the everyday understanding of the concepts “black” and “white”. As in the previous examples, the circulation of such discourses within the classroom may not only reinforce existing categories, but also create new ones (“Blacks”, “adopted children”, “migrants”, etc.) and turn everyday concepts into objective facts, that is, reify them. In brief, the analysis of these lessons evidenced a variety of dialogical tensions between dialogue in presence and dialogue in absence and showed the teachers’ difficulty in eliciting secondarisation. Moreover, informal observations, such as those just reported, showed that in some cases, discussing such sensitive “real-world” issues had unwanted effects on the classroom group dynamics and possibly (although we have no evidence of this) outside the classroom and the school.These observations showed that the problem is not limited to describing the interactive dynamics occurring within the classroom but raises questions beyond the school context, 604

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such as: how can these topics be discussed without compromising the students’ private lives and opinions? What latitude should students be given to express their personal opinions? Does the introduction of “real-world” issues in the classroom imply that any and every discourse can be expressed? These questions raise issues about the ethical responsibility we have as researchers or, more broadly, as stakeholders in education and practitioners, when we choose to introduce these sensitive issues in school. Let us examine this point.

Dialogical tensions in the researcher’s practices As we reported, an interaction is, according to Latour (1996), both a framework and a network, which implies some discrepancy between the two. By showing the intertwinement between dialogue in presence and dialogue in absence, and the dialogical tensions it created, the results of our study focused on classroom interactions as a network but, by the same token, led us to consider the framework of these interactions, that is, the way in which these discussions are framed. Framing the discussion, indicating what the activity is about and how to talk about the topics under discussion is, in our view, a key element that may avoid some unwanted effects, such as legitimising a particular discourse, reinforcing or even creating stereotypes and stigmatisation (e.g., Heatherton et al., 2003). Framing the discussion is important in the context of research as well as that of intervention. Indeed, researchers in sociocultural psychology are sometimes asked to help various stakeholders (heads of schools or other institutions, teacher trainers, etc.) to face new challenges or solve particular problems. A brief example illustrates how one of us (Nathalie Muller Mirza) dealt with this question in an intervention that took place a few months after the end of the TECS project. Supported by the school management, a teacher who worked in a vocational school, and knew of our interest in education for cultural diversity, asked for an intervention in a class beset with violent and racist beha­ viours. He expected a change in the classroom climate and the establishment of respectful relationships between the students who, according to him, represented “cultural diversity”. After discussion, his request was accepted but on one condition: the intervention would not be framed as a problem of cultural diversity. Rather, an intervention was proposed in which students would be invited to work on (1) their personal trajectories, through the use of a fictional narrative genre (Bruner, 2002) and (2) the social skills needed to work together. This was achieved through pedagogical settings aimed at developing their ability to take each other’s perspective (Muller Mirza & Perret-Clermont, 2009). In other words, the intervention set up a framework which was meant to avoid tackling head on the question of “cultural diversity”, assuming that thematising it could have amounted to establishing it as a fact. The intervention was a success, for by the end of the sessions, the climate of the classroom had become more peaceful, respectful and collaborative (Muller Mirza, 2016). This example shows that a dialogical approach to classroom interactions does not only draw our attention to interactional learning processes but also to the context of these interactions. In this light, elaborating a setting that promotes an argumentative discussion is only part of the story. Analysing the dialogical tensions between this setting and other situations, and framing the present dialogue accordingly, is of crucial importance. Such analysis also implies that having a setting or prescribing teaching practices which fit any school context is impossible.

Conclusion The notion of interaction relies on various theoretical, epistemological and ontological conceptions. We have quickly presented three different conceptions: interaction as a series of consecutive individual actions, interaction as a process of co-construction, interaction as a contradictory 605

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form between framework and network. By considering students as social actors involved in heterogeneous spaces and times, by pointing to the multilayeredness of any situation, the third conception shifts attention to the dialogical tensions between situations. Because of its link with “real-world” and sensitive issues, education for cultural diversity was an appropriate teaching-learning situation in which to study dialogical tensions. The analysis of the data showed that present dialogues were filled up with distant dialogues and that the resulting dialogical tensions seemed to be an obstacle to secondarisation. These results have at least three consequences. First, they invite us to scrutinise the educational settings and broader contexts to which the students connect the topics discussed in the classroom. Hence, further research needs to document the dynamics occurring between situations and to develop appropriate research methods to identify the conditions in which these dialogical tensions are either a resource or an obstacle for learning (Bronkhorst & Akkerman, 2016). Second, on a practical level, they show the need to develop teacher training, as teaching such sensitive topics requires the teachers themselves to go through secondarisation.Third, they also raise important ethical issues since, as we showed, talking of such topics in the classroom should give the students an opportunity to reflect on social processes and not just to express (and even legitimate) everyday ideas. To sum up, a dialogical approach leads us to consider a teaching-learning setting as part of a broader network of situations and the learner as a social actor participating in different social practices, performing various identities and displaying a variety of knowledge.

Acknowledgment The TECS research project was supported by a grant from the Swiss National Foundation (100013_132292) and was made possible thanks to the support of the school authorities and of the Centre for Global Education in Switzerland. The authors thank Stéphanie de Diesbach-Dolder and Laura Nicollin for their contribution to the TECS project.The authors are also grateful to the school authorities, teachers and students whose cooperation made this project possible.

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Appendix: norms of transcription

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42 UNDERSTANDING CONFLICT TRANSFORMATION DIALOGUE THROUGH CODING BASED ON BUBER AND ROGERS Toshiyasu Tsuruhara and Hilary Cremin

Introduction Conflict is often described with terms such as ‘struggle’, ‘clash’, or ‘incompatibility’.These terms are not usually seen as positive. However, Dietrich (2013) considers that conflict is a ‘natural product of human interaction and inherent in every relationship’ (p. 6). Problems arise when attempts to resolve conflict are hampered by differing ‘perceptions, interpretations, expressions, and intentions’ (Dietrich, 2013, p. 6). Conflict can be transformed through positive change in the people involved or in the conflict itself.When these changes are superficial, involving for example a suppression of the eruption of physical violence, or a bare compromise, the energy of the conflict is constrained, and the potential benefits that it brings go unnoticed. In order to revitalise the flow of interhuman relationships, Dietrich suggests that conflict must be ‘remembered and neutralised’ (Dietrich, 2013, p. 6) in ways that enable it to bring about human flourishing. Conflict can be transformed through dialogue. In this chapter we will discuss restorative disciplinary meetings in secondary schools in the UK as examples of conflict transformation dialogue.We will focus on one school where specially trained teachers facilitate restorative meetings for students who are experiencing conflict. This school uses this term ‘restorative justice’. However, some educational researchers suggest ‘restorative practice’ or ‘restorative approaches (RA)’ instead, because ‘restorative justice’ has developed within criminal justice, not school education (Sellman, Cremin, and McCluskey, 2013). Some other researchers and practitioners call this type of meeting ‘mediation’.This chapter uses the term ‘restorative approaches’. RA has spread across schools in the UK since the mid-1990s (Hendry, 2009) and positive impacts on school life have been reported (for example, Youth Justice Board for England and Wales, 2004; Sellman et al., 2013). There is, however, very little research that investigates the nature of the dialogue itself. Exceptions are Westrup (2015) and Tsuruhara (2018).1 Both use conversation analysis (CA) to document and analyse what actually is happening during RA. Tsuruhara goes on to investigate RA using a coding framework that is informed by Martin Buber’s I and Thou and Carl Rogers’ client-centred approach. In the rest of this chapter, we will discuss what we mean by conflict transformation dialogue and how this differs from problem-solving dialogue and conflict escalation dialogue. 610

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We will then explore relational transformation with the theories of Martin Buber and Carl Rogers and suggest a coding framework for the analysis of conflict transformation dialogue in schools following peer disputes and bullying.

What is conflict transformation dialogue? Conflict transformation dialogue is a development from conflict resolution theory, which began in the latter half of the twentieth century, mainly with lawyers wanting to find alternatives to formal legal procedures and the destructive consequences of the dominant Win–Lose paradigm. Deutsch, for example, in his theory of conflict resolution (1949, 1973, 1985), argues that conflict can change from being destructive to being constructive through cooperation and constructive controversy. When people are able to share their inevitable differences in understanding, perspectives, and world views, they gain clarity and the ability to pursue a solution that builds on the best ideas that have emerged. While Deutsch (2006) considers conflict as something that needs to be resolved and eliminated as part of a technical/rational project, Dietrich (2013) sees conflict as an inevitable part of human interaction that can be recognised and welcomed as a means of bringing about transformation of the self and others. He sees this as part of ‘transrational peace’. According to him, tension arises within a person when an incident (that is described as a ‘conflict episode’) traps her in a dilemma between self-preservation and self-change. This tension causes fear, aggression, boredom, or indifference, which hamper the human capacity for transformation. In other words, conflict is located not in interpersonal relationships alone but in the tension between self-preservation and self-transformation. For Dietrich, this tension lies not only in the arena of rationality and choice but also in the arena of spirituality and cosmic balancing of energies. This perspective towards self- and relational transformation in a conflict setting is seen in Martin Buber’s philosophy of I and Thou (1937),2 and Carl Rogers’ client-centred approach (1951; 1957; 1959) and theories of interpersonal relationships (Rogers, 1959). Both Buber and Rogers draw on notions of spirituality and discuss conflict, relational transformation, and dialogue. For Buber, conflict occurs when a relationship is characterised by ‘I–It’. This is when someone views another as an object, failing to recognise that they too are thinking and acting beings in the world (Morgan and Guilherme, 2014). For Rogers, conflict occurs when someone can’t acknowledge the other’s experiences (Rogers, 1959). Therefore, relationship, for both Buber and Rogers, is the state in which two persons recognise each other’s experience or existence. Dialogue, if held in the right way, can enable this to happen. Buber (1965) explains how transformation from I–It to I–Thou ways of relating can occur through being, making present, and unfolding. ‘Being’ is to present oneself to the other as who one is and not as who one would wish to be or to be seen as. Buber argues that one is never understood by the other without disclosing her/his authentic self. ‘Making present’ is to acknowledge and appreciate the other as someone different from oneself. This does not mean unconditional acceptance or giving up one’s own firmly held beliefs. It simply implies a faith in the humanity and capacity to self-actualise of each unique individual. ‘Unfolding’ is a concept that is the opposite of imposition. It comes about when there is a desire ‘to find and to further in the soul of the other the disposition toward what he has recognised in himself as the right’ (p. 82). The key terms for Rogers are: (in)congruence; unconditional positive regard; and empathy. Incongruence occurs when a person has a block between what they say or believe and what they feel and experience. Rogers describes a human as an organism that ‘has one basic tendency and striving – to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism’ (Rogers, 1951, 611

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p. 487) and an organism that, ‘reacts to the field as it is experienced and perceived’ (p. 484). A person experiences a block when this does not happen. For example, this would occur if someone thinks that she does not like her father but actually enjoys every meeting with him. This gap, stemming from incongruence, creates anxiety and leads to a distortion of experience and rigidity of perception.To avoid anxiety, she may deny her joyful experience when she meets her father. In order to overcome this, dialogue with a therapist or teacher needs to be characterised by unconditional positive regard and empathy that would help her to accept her experience without distortion. This in turn would lead to congruence and self-actualisation. As will be clear from the previous, both Buber and Rogers reject imposition and argue for the acknowledgement of the other. They agree that relational transformation comes only after the recognition of authentic and differentiated selves who exist in non-judgemental and empathic spaces.

Restorative approaches Restorative approaches to conflict in schools are a practical expression of these ideas. They offer a means of restoring relationships when harm has been done. Restorative approaches build on restorative justice in the criminal justice sector, whereby those harmed by crime or conflict, and those responsible for the harm, are facilitated by a third party to communicate and work together to repair the harm and find a positive way forward. In schools the restorative facilitator provides a non-judgmental space for peers experiencing conflict to come together to find a good outcome. For example, Cremin and Bevington (2017) suggest a core set of questions that can be asked at a restorative meeting following a critical incident: •• •• ••

What harm has been done? What needs has this harm created? Whose responsibility is it to address these needs, and how can they be enabled to do this? (p. 92)

Both Buber and Rogers likewise recognise the role of a third party or third element in a conflict. Buber discusses the need for ‘the centre’ (1965) and Rogers ‘the facilitator’ (1959) to help people in conflict find their authentic self in a non-judgmental, safe environment.

How can conflict transformation be understood and measured? Conflict transformation is difficult to tie down and therefore to measure and understand. Of course the usual methods of qualitative research can be useful – interviews, questionnaires, or observation, including the analysis of audio/video recorded dialogue – but methodological concerns are equally important. For example, whose perspectives really count? What is the best way of capturing these perspectives? How do we go about analysing and understanding these perspectives? Interviews allow us direct access to the people who were involved in conflict transformation dialogue, but their answers represent their perception at the moment of the interview, not during the dialogue itself. Inevitably, such data are unable to escape from retrospective bias. Also, their answers are influenced by what they feel is the right thing to say. The interview itself is a social interaction between the interviewer and the interviewees, and this can alter the interviewee’s perception of the past experience (Blumer, 1969). If we need to analyse the moment of conflict transformation, interview is not the best method for data collection. 612

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Observation overcomes some of the concerns about interviews. Data are collected through the researcher’s note-taking, which may occur after the event. However, it is very difficult for any researcher to depict the conflict transformation dialogue accurately from memory and notetaking, because memory is also vulnerable to retrospective bias, and the notes are only those which appeared to be interesting or striking to the researcher. In other words, the data collected through observation are likely to be affected by the researcher’s subjective and retrospective bias. Audio/video recordings of conflict transformation dialogue offer a counterpoint to the limitations of interview and observation based on note-taking.Transcriptions taken from recordings can reproduce the verbalised dialogue, including overlaps, the tone of the voice, and silences, and help an in-depth analysis of interaction. It is this technique that we will present here – based on the doctoral research of one of the authors (Tsuruhara, 2018) and a coding scheme that was developed between us.

Coding dialogue using conversation analysis (CA) Conversation analysis is a way of coding dialogue to reveal the complexity of human interaction during these encounters. Coding dialogue using categories generated from theory is not usual in CA, as it aims to analyse the construction of meaning by looking at speech turns inductively, without theory.There are some CA research studies that have used coding for this kind of analysis, however (for example, Peräkylä et al., 2015; Clayman, Heritage, Elliott, & McDonald, 2007; Stivers and Majid, 2007; Mangione-Smith, Elliott, Stivers, McDonald, & Heritage, 2006), and we have used the mechanisms of CA in our own work due to its usefulness for our purposes. We take account of the warnings from researchers such as Stivers (2015), who argues that coding ‘risks a massive reduction and flattening of complex human behaviours’ (p. 1). We do this by taking account of each speech turn in the light of the preceding and following turns. We are interested, not only in the composition of each turn, but also in the interactions between turns, including factors such as elapsed time between turns and overlaps.

Coding scheme for conflict transformation Once we had used CA to reveal the complexity of the dialogue, we then sought to analyse and understand it based on our theoretical perspectives drawn from Buber and Rogers. We created two coding schemes – one to code students’ speech and actions, the other to code those of the teacher-facilitator. For the students, there are eight codes plus ‘unable to code (UTC)’. The codes are divided into two groups: I–Thou and I–It; thus the codes indicate a student’s attitude towards the other student. The top four codes are listed under ‘I–Thou’, through which the student accepts who she is and recognises the other student. The bottom four codes are under I–It, through which the student objectifies the other student and/or the facilitator (see Table 42.1). Respect is when a student shows respect towards the other student without objectifying him/her, which demonstrates the I-Thou moment (Buber, 1937). Expansive is the code for a student’s action that indicates his/her understanding of, or empathy towards, the other student. Both Rogers (1959) and Buber (1965) argue for the role of empathy in conflict transformation. Open is the expression of feelings, thinking, and emotions. Buber stresses the importance of being who s/he is, instead of who s/he wants to be seen as, while Rogers argues for acknowledging what has been experienced without distortion. Clarifying does not appear in Buber and Rogers, but it is developed from restorative justice/mediation researchers’ concepts of ‘engagement’ (Blake, 1999), ‘stance of curiosity’ (Putnum, 2004), and ‘interest’ (Kelly and Thorsborne, 2014). 613

Toshiyasu Tsuruhara and Hilary Cremin Table 42.1 Coding scheme for students Code

Description

Towards I–Thou Respect

Showing respect to the other

Expansive Open Clarifying

Examples

‘Sorry, for bulling you and saying stuff.’ ‘We shake hands and be cool.’ Showing understanding of, or ‘It’s hurt him.’ empathy towards, the other student ‘He was shocked.’ Expressing feelings, thinking, ‘I couldn’t control myself.’ emotions ‘Kind of scared.’ Making a clarifying statement, ‘(You’re) trying to stop yourself hearing question, or answer what I’m saying?’ ‘You’re saying I’m disturbing you?’

Towards I–It ‘Because she was mad.’ ‘She pushed me like so hard.’ Defiant Defending self against the other or ‘I don’t have any problem with anyone.’ the facilitator ‘I only start to get rude when you’ve got rude to me.’ Submissive Showing obedience to the facilitator ‘Yes, yes, sir.’ ‘Yeah’ (soft voice). Closed Refusal to speak (3.0) (pause for three seconds) ‘Well, I’ll be going out.’ Unable to code (UTC) Does not match to any codes above Attacking

Blaming the other

Note:  Adapted from Tsuruhara (2018), p. 115.

Attacking and Defiant are similar concepts. As discussed previously, Rogers proposes that the organism defends itself from a threatening experience by distorting the experience or denying an awareness of the experience. Although Attacking and Defiant are both actions that distort the experience to protect the self-structure, Attacking is putting the blame on the other, whereas Defiant is defending oneself from the other. Submissive is a code for a student’s action that indicates his/her obedience to the facilitator. Rogers’ concept of ‘conditions of worth’ describes the way in which a child chooses to take an action that is regarded positively by adults, rather than one that is satisfactory to the child. We code exchanges as submissive where a student does not agree with the facilitator, or facilitation, but acts in order to meet the expectations of the facilitator. ‘Submissive’ may bring the conflict to resolution, but this is not conflict transformation, as the student is only concerned with preserving self-regard and not with improving the relationship with the other. Closed is a code for the refusal to speak, either to the other student, or the facilitator, or both. This code contrasts with Open. We argue that this is a form of defence, in order to protect oneself from a threatening experience by shutting down communication with the other. One of Rogers’ descriptions of defence (‘the denial to awareness of the experience’) (1959, p. 227) may be similar to the code ‘closed’. For the facilitator, there are nine codes plus ‘unable to code (UTC)’. These codes are also divided into two groups: I–Thou and I–It, and refer to the facilitator’s attitude towards students. In Table 42.2, the top five codes are listed under ‘I–Thou’, through which the facilitator accepts 614

Conflict transformation dialogue Table 42.2 Coding scheme for the facilitator Code Towards I–Thou Assertive Empathetic

Elicitive Clarifying Wu wei

Description

Examples

Expressing without semblance or imposition Demonstrating empathetic understanding of the student’s awareness of his/her experience Enabling a student’s sense of freedom in expressing him/herself Asking a clarifying question

‘I never insist on apology.’ ‘RJ is not an investigation.’ ‘That may be a concern for you.’ ‘You’ve been affected.’ ‘So, you’re annoyed.’ ‘How does that make you feel?’ ‘Anything else you need?’ ‘Do you largely agree with the event?’ ‘Fair enough?’ After Wu wei, the facilitator asks elicitive question ‘What do you think toward what she said?’

Letting students speak to each other without interruption, even if highly emotional

Towards I–It Laissez-faire

Letting students speak to each other without interruption when an intervention (e.g. to stop re-victimisation) is called for Conditional Approving or praising a student’s positive regard action which meets the facilitator’s expectation Judgmental Negatively analysing or judging what a student did or said Directive Telling a student what to do Unable to code (UTC)

(Not being assertive when a student’s sexuality is being attacked.) (Not being assertive when the students continue to attack each other.) ‘Thank you very much, if you do that.’ (After a student agreed to the facilitator’s directive comments) ‘That’s fair enough.’ ‘I think Matt has been more deeply affected.’ ‘Your parents know what you said?’ ‘It might make you angry, but that’s, that’s life.’ ‘You’ve got to understand that she’s upset.’

Does not match to any codes above

Note:  Adapted from Tsuruhara (2018), p. 117.

the student as who s/he is, without expectation, analysis, or evaluation. The bottom four codes are listed under I–It, through which the facilitator objectifies, classifies, and judges the students. Assertive is the code for avoiding ‘Laissez-faire’, i.e. speaking up when it is called for in order to reinforce the basic safety of the dialogue for one or both parties. If dialogue is to ‘unfold’ without semblance or imposition (Buber, 1965) it is essential that both parties feel safe. For this, the facilitator may need to re-assert the agreement to listen to each other respectfully and to avoid insulting comments or behaviour. This is not the same as asserting an opinion on the conflict itself or trying to direct outcomes. Empathetic is the facilitator’s empathy towards a student, which both Buber and Rogers discuss as the key element for conflict transformation. Elicitive is the code for a facilitator’s speech or attitude, which permit a student’s freedom of expression. This description is adapted from Rogers (1967), but in this research, ‘elicitive’ includes both verbal and non-verbal acts which elicit a student’s response. Elicitation may take the form of questioning, not to collect new information, but rather to help students experience and express feelings. In this sense, ‘elicitive’ is different from Clarifying, which is the facilitator’s action for information gathering. 615

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Both Wu wei and Laissez-faire are codes for the facilitator’s silence whilst students talk directly to each other. However, these codes are contrasting. Wu wei, which has been adopted from Buber’s discussion of Taoism, is not nonaction but an action through the whole being that leads the other to unity without imposing. Laissez-faire means: ‘[a] policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering’, or ‘unwillingness to get involved in or influence other people’s activities’ (Laissez-faire, n.d.). This concept is not seen in either Buber or in Rogers’ theory, but it is added as a counter concept of Wu wei. Therefore, although both Wu wei and Laissez-faire are non-verbal, the former views the other as a person to be cared for, whereas the latter does not. Conditional positive regard is an opposing concept to Rogers’ unconditional positive regard. Rogers actually states that this occurs when ‘the positive regard of a significant other is conditional’ (1959, p. 209) during his discussion of conditions of worth (see Submissive for ‘conditions of worth’). It is a code for the facilitator’s approving or praising of a student’s response when that student’s response satisfies his expectation. Because it objectifies the student, it is listed in the section of ‘I–It’, even though such an action may lead to resolution of the conflict. Judgmental views the student as an object to be appraised. It is a weaker form of Buber’s ‘I–It’ ‘imposition’. Directive is stronger and is used to code orders that are given directly or indirectly.

How can coded dialogue be further analysed? In this section we include some examples of how we went about further analysing data, based on these codes. For example, we have been able to undertake numerical analysis. As can be seen in Table 42.3, each speaker is assigned to a separate column, and the dialogue flows downwards. The facilitator’s speech turn ‘How did you feel, when they were doing this?’ is followed by Matt’s turn starting with ‘Both angry and disappointed’. The arrow (F→M, for example) indicates the direction of an utterance from whom to whom where the direction is unclear. One code was selected for each cell, which is the unit of a turn. The coded data in Table 42.3 can be used in different ways, for example, numerically or qualitatively. For numerical analysis, we simply counted the number of times that each code appears in each case and compared it across cases. Table 42.4 shows how often the code ‘Elicitive’ appears in each case and category. Tsuruhara (2018) examined the ending of each of the meetings and classified nine cases into three categories:

Table 42.3 An example of coded dialogue Matt (M)

Facilitator (F) (F→M) Elicitive ‘How did you feel, when they were doing this?’

Open ‘Both angry and disappointed, because I thought that, when someone finds a girlfriend, that everyone else stays out a bit, and does not get involved, but … (F→M) Empathetic ‘So you’re disappointed, in that way you’re angry. Any other emotions?’ Open ‘Alright’.

616

Robert (R)

P 7

35.4%

RT1 48 17

V 10

38.8%

RT2 43 17 M R 11 6 39.5%

Relational Transformation

Note:  Adapted from Tsuruhara (2018), p. 261.

Elicitive/facilitator’s turns (%) Cross-case average (%)

Case Facilitator’s turns Elicitive Towards:

Category

Table 42.4 Numerical summary of the ‘Elicitive’ code

T 8 41.6%

RT3 48 20 B 12

R 9 29.0%

RO1 62 18 M 9

Resolution Only

31.0%

RO2 58 16 Y S 8 8 27.6% L 8 37.3%

RO3 51 19 D 11

H A 7 3 10.6%

NT1 94 10

16.6%

K J 21 12 23.7%

NT2 139 33

Conflict not transformed

E 4 11.5%

NT3 87 10 F 6

Toshiyasu Tsuruhara and Hilary Cremin

Relational Transformation (RT); Resolution Only (RO); and Conflict not transformed (NT). Relational Transformation cases end with clear evidence of mutual apology, respect for each other, new learning and aspirations, etc. Conflict not transformed cases end with clear evidence of dissatisfaction on the part of one or both students. Resolution Only cases reach an agreement without clear evidence of relational transformation. ‘Facilitator’s turns’ means the total number of the facilitator’s turns during the meeting, and ‘Elicitive’ is the number of the facilitator’s turns that are coded as ‘Elicitive’. ‘Towards’ shows the initials of the students who participated in the conflict transformation dialogue and the number of times that the student was subject to the facilitator’s elicitive words and actions. ‘Elicitive/ facilitator’s turns (%)’ shows the percentage of the facilitator’s ‘elicitive’ turns. For example, in case RT1, ‘Elicitive’ was seen 17 times in the facilitator’s 48 turns, thus the share of ‘Elicitive’ turns in all of the facilitator’s turns is 35.4%. ‘Cross-case Average (%)’ shows the cross-case average within the same category. For example, in the category ‘Relational Transformation’, there is a total of 54 turns that are coded as ‘Elicitive’ (RT1 = 17, RT2 = 17, RT3 = 20) amongst the total of 139 turns of the facilitator (RT1 = 48, RT2 = 43, RT3 = 48). Therefore, the share of ‘Elicitive’ turns is 38.8%. Cross-category comparison suggests that there is a pattern – elicitive facilitation is more frequently seen in the Relational Transformation category than in any other category. It is also interesting to note that there is clear difference between Resolution Only (31.0%) and Conflict-not-transformed categories (16.6%). A similar pattern is seen for the facilitator’s ‘Empathetic’ and the students’ ‘Open’ and ‘Expansive’ codes: these are more frequently seen in the Relational Transformation category than in any other category. These findings support a possible conclusion that the facilitator’s ‘Empathetic’ and ‘Elicitive’ words and actions help the students to be ‘Open’ and ‘Expansive’. This is in line with the theories of Buber and Rogers. Table 42.5 shows how frequently the students use ‘Open’ and ‘Expansive’ words and actions right after the facilitator has been ‘Elicitive’ or ‘Empathetic’ in the Relational Transformation category. Over 60% of ‘Open’ and ‘Expansive’ words and actions on the part of students follow on from the facilitator’s ‘Elicitive’ or ‘Empathetic’ words and actions. We can also explore this qualitatively by using a table of the coded dialogue. Table 42.6 is an extract from Case RT3, that is a dialogue between Tim and Basem. After having discussed how Basem has been affected by the incident, the facilitator is asking Tim about his experience as a result of his action.

Table 42.5 Numerical summary of the ‘Open’ and ‘Expansive’ codes, followed by ‘Elicitive’ or ‘Empathetic’ codes Case

RT1

Student’s name Pawan Total ‘Open’ and O E ‘Expansive’ (A) 5 4 ‘Open’ and ‘Expansive’ 3 2 that follow ‘Elicitive’ or ‘Empathetic’ (B) (B)/(A) (%) 55.6% Cross-case average

RT2 Vivek O E 13 3 8 2

62.5%

RT3

Matt O 5 4

E 7 5

75.0%

Robert E 1 0

Tim O E 8 6 6 3

60.0% 67.2%

64.3%

O 4 3

Note:  O = Open. E = Expansive. Adapted from Tsuruhara (2018), p. 156.

618

O 4 4

Basem E 1 1

100%

Conflict transformation dialogue Table 42.6 An example of elicitive facilitation Tim 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Facilitator Elicitive: How, how have you been affected by this?

Open: Punishment, like obviously, ((inaudible)) made me actually think about what happened to him. Erm, … hopefully, like, I won’t do anything like that again. Elicitive: What about after the incident, when you had some quiet moments to yourself to reflect, how did, how did you feel? Expansive: I felt, it’s a, think about if it was me that it happened to, like, how I got to be feeling like, um, and like the anger, humiliation, and embarrassment, I would be feeling.

Note:  Adapted from Tsuruhara (2018), p. 148. Table 42.7 An example of judgmental facilitation Karen 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Facilitator

Open: Because I, I wanted that fight. Because of, I needed to get stuff out of my system. I couldn’t. Judgmental: But you didn’t get that stuff out of your system at all. Defiant: I know, but that was not always my first way. Judgmental: OK, fair enough.You’re honest. I want to say it’s a less advisable way, but …

Note:  Adapted from Tsuruhara (2018), p. 221.

Although it is Tim whose actions did harm to Basem, the facilitator asks how Tim has been affected by the incident. Tim says that he was affected by the punishment (Line 3) and demonstrates perspective-taking (Lines 4–5). In the following turn, the facilitator continues to ask an elicitive question (Lines 8–11), which leads Tim to acknowledge the feelings that Basem might have had as a result of his actions (Lines 12–16). Table 42.7 is an extract from Case NT2. It is a restorative dialogue about an incident between Karen and Jane. Jane hit Karen, but Karen admits that she wound Jane up until she hit her. Karen reveals that she wanted to fight with the other student because she ‘needed to get stuff out’ (Lines 2–3). In Lines 4–5, the facilitator is telling her that she was unsuccessful, which only evokes her defiance (Lines 6–7). In the following turn (Lines 8–10), the facilitator clearly judges her actions, even though his turn starts with ‘OK, fair enough.You’re honest’. 619

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While both Table 42.6 (RT) and Table 42.7 (NT) show a moment in which students are facilitated to reflect on their experience, the facilitation is contrasting. While the facilitator in Table 42.6 simply acknowledges what Tim said and unfolds it with elicitive questions, the facilitator in Table 42.7 judges what Karen said. The tables also display the consequence of the facilitator’s turn and how the preceding turns affect the following turns.

Conclusion This chapter started with the concept of conflict transformation and discussed how it builds on twentieth-century conflict resolution. Although both address conflict, conflict transformation prioritises relational transformation and personal transformation. Both have benefits, but conflict resolution may not go far enough if it fails to work with the discordant energy of the conflict episode in order to bring about wider change and growth, especially in schools where options for not seeing each other are limited, and some young people find themselves on the wrong side of school disciplinary policy and practice and school exclusion. We presented our coding framework here and showed how we have used this in conjunction with conversation analysis (CA) to understand conflict transformation dialogue using the theories of Buber and Rogers. We have shown how our numerical analysis of coded data measured what is happening in RP dialogue and revealed that conflict transformation favours elicitive and empathetic facilitation. Our qualitative analysis demonstrated the usefulness of coding conflict transformation dialogue to visualise how facilitation can help or hinder students’ acknowledgement of their own and the other’s experiences, and we have shown how the facilitator’s turn affects the following turns of the student. Our data have shown that conflict transformation is possible in a school context and that restorative meetings can be facilitated by a school teacher. Therefore, it is a missed opportunity to blame a student (i.e. exclusion) for what a school is not able to deliver. However, we also acknowledge that restorative facilitation, especially elicitive and empathetic facilitation, is not easy for teachers, because they are subject to multiple expectations and because they too, struggle with incongruence (Rogers) or finding an authentic self (Buber) within the norms, rules, and roles of cultures of schooling. In order for the teachers to become elicitive and empathetic facilitators, they also need a change in their personal consciousness. Such a change requires constant awareness of the inner conflict between self-preservation and self-growth but also safe and non-judgmental spaces for them to work in.

Notes 1 Rossner (2011; 2013) analyses a video-recorded restorative justice dialogue in a criminal setting. 2 English translation. Originally published in German in 1923.

References Blake, O.E. (1999). Turning Points in Mediations: An Examination of Disputant Resolution Behaviours in Mediations (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Buber, M. (1937). I and Thou. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Buber, M. (1965). Distance and relation. In M. Buber (Ed.), The Knowledge of Man. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Clayman, S.E., Heritage, J., Elliott, M. & McDonald, L. (2007). When does the watchdog bark? Conditions of aggressive questioning in presidential news conferences. American Sociological Review, 72, 23–41.

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Conflict transformation dialogue Cremin, H. & Bevington, T. (2017). Positive Peace in Schools: Tackling Conflict and Creating a Culture of Peace in the Classroom. London: Routledge. Deutsch, M. (1949). A theory of cooperation and competition. Human Relations, 2(2), 129–152. Deutsch, M. (1973). The Resolution of Conflict: Constructive and Destructive Processes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Deutsch, M. (1985). Distributive Justice: A Social Psychological Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Deutsch, M. (2006). Introduction. In M. Deutsch, P.T. Coleman & E.C. Marcus (Eds.), The Handbook of Conflict Resolution:Theory and Practice (2nd ed., pp. 1–20). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Dietrich, W. (2013). Elicitive Conflict Transformation and the Transrational Shift in Peace Politics [electronic resource]. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hendry, R. (2009). Building and Restoring Respectful Relationships in Schools: A Guide to Using Restorative Practice. London: Routledge. Kelly,V. & Thorsborne, M. (2014). The Psychology of Emotion in Restorative Practice: How Affect Script Psychology Explains How and Why Restorative Practice Works. London: Jessica Kingsley. Laisse-faire. (n.d.) In Oxford Dictionaries. Retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ laissez-faire Mangione-Smith, R., Elliott, M.N., Stivers, T., McDonald, L.L. & Heritage, J. (2006). Ruling out the need for antibiotics: Are we sending the right message?. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 160, 945–952. Morgan, W. & Guilherme, A. (2014). Buber and Education: Dialogue as Conflict Resolution. Abingdon: Routledge. Peräkylä, A., Henttonen, P., Voutilainen, L., Kahri, M., Stevanovic, M., Sams, M. & Ravaja, N. (2015). Sharing the emotional load. Social Psychology Quarterly, 78(4), 301–323. Putnam, L.L. (2004). Transformations and critical moments in negotiations. Negotiation Journal, 20(2), 275–295. Rogers, C.R. (1951). Client-Centered Therapy, Its Current Practice, Implications, and Theory. London: Constable. Rogers, C.R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 21(2), 95–103. Rogers, C.R. (1959). A theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships as developed in the client-centered framework. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A Study of a Science. Vol. 3: Formulations of the Person and the Social Context (pp. 184–256). New York: McGraw Hill. Rogers, C.R. (1967). On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. London: Constable & Robinson. Rossner, M. (2011). Emotions and interaction ritual: A micro analysis of restorative justice. The British Journal of Criminology, 51(1), 95–119. Rossner, M. (2013). Just Emotions: Rituals of Restorative Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sellman, E., Cremin, H. & McCluskey, G. (2013). Restorative Approaches to Conflict in Schools: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Whole School Approaches to Managing Relationships. London: Routledge. Stivers, T. (2015). Coding social interaction: A heretical approach in conversation analysis? Research on Language and Social Interaction, 48(1), 1–19. Stivers,T. & Majid, A. (2007). Questioning children: Interactional evidence of implicit bias in medical interviews. Social Psychology Quarterly, 70, 424–441. Tsuruhara, T. (2018). Relational Transformation Through Dialogue: Conflict Mediation in a Secondary School in the UK (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. Westrup, S. (2015). An Examination of Restorative Justice Conferences in a Primary School Using Conversation Analysis (Doctoral thesis). Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK. Retrieved from http://orcamwe.cf.ac. uk/76545/1/Sadie%20Westrup%20Thesis%20Submission.pdf Youth Justice Board for England and Wales. (2004). National Evaluation of the Restorative Justice in Schools Programme.Youth Justice Board.

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43 CREATING AN ‘ETHIC OF CARE’ IN A VERTICAL TUTOR GROUP Addressing students’ challenges through dialogue Rupert Higham and Hans De Vynck

Introduction The aspiration of developing the ‘whole child’ – emotionally, socially, intellectually and spiritually – has a long history. In England it grew bolder with the publication 50 years ago of the Plowden Report and subsequently peaked in the 1970s alongside the drive towards comprehensive secondary education. The commitment to this rounded development is maintained at policy level and is still structurally visible in the curriculum of maintained schools in the form of spiritual, moral, social and cultural education (SMSC), personal, social and health education (PSHE) and citizenship. However, an increasing focus on academic competition within and between schools since the 1980s, especially in subjects compared through international testing since 2000, has led to a narrowing of the curriculum – despite the commitment to it being ‘balanced and broadly based’ (Department for Education, 2013, p. 5) – and a reorientation of schools’ mission around measurable performance. This is a likely contributing factor to a rising tide of stress and mental illness among young people (Longfield, 2017). Bates has argued that the recent policy focus on developing students’ character – in particular, ‘resilience’ (Department for Education, 2013) and ‘grit’ (Morgan, 2017) – represents another reframing of whole child development: the ‘management of “emotional labour” of children’ within a ‘corporate re-imagining of schools’ where emotional qualities are a valuable commodity in the future workplace (Bates, 2017, p. 66). More prosaically, promotion of these qualities can be understood as an attempt to make a virtue of the increasingly pressured environment in which children find themselves. The tutor system is an enduring structural feature of English middle and secondary schools, designed to support students by developing strong personal teacher–student relations (Pring, 1985). Tutor time generally consists of one or two short sessions a day, usually first thing in the morning and/or after lunch, organised either within single year groups or in ‘vertical’ groups of mixed-age children (often known as ‘house’ groups, an antiquated term derived from the era of boarding schools). Students generally stay with their tutor throughout their school career. This framework for personal support, together with the life-skills-orientated curriculum topics mentioned previously, constitute what is known as ‘pastoral care’. Within tutor time a broad range of developmental focuses are possible; anecdotally, however, it is seen as dominated by administrative tasks such as registration, school announcements and the policing of uniforms, although there is currently very little research to corroborate this. 622

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This chapter reports on an action research project undertaken by an experienced teacher and Master’s student (De Vynck), working with an academic supervisor (Higham), aimed at making the most of tutor time to promote students’ broad personal development. De Vynck sought to develop over a year of tutor time sessions an ‘ethic of care’ (Noddings, 1984), building a culture of openness and mutual support in which students could address present and future challenges through dialogue. The children in this independent middle school were much less affected than most by pressures of poverty but more so by high expectations in a very competitive climate. We will illustrate how these sessions, founded in a philosophy of humane dialogue, supported students’ skills of communication around sensitive topics and the development of their agency. They also lead to emotional breakthroughs at an often turbulent stage of personal development and were an empowering developmental process for the teacher. Finally, we will argue that such approaches provide an opportunity to engage with personal, interpersonal and societal issues that are too often crowded out of the curriculum.

Pastoral care The term ‘pastoral care’ was coined by Michael Marland in his 1974 book of the same name; Marland went on to pioneer its development and study (Best, 2014). Drawing on this work, Pring defines it as ‘the conscious effort to help young people in one way or another to develop as persons’ (1985, p. 135) but adds that it also plays a role in foreseeing and dealing with individual pupil issues. In England, it has its origin in private schools from the late 1700s onwards, which led to the implementation of vertical ‘house’ systems consisting of children of different ages from across the school (Ribbins & Best, 1985); a growing awareness of the responsibility for pupils’ mental, physical and moral welfare continued into the 1800s. When the government started to provide ‘elementary education’ (ibid., p. 19) the house system was adopted by many of these state schools for inter-house competition as well as more granular engagement; over time, ease of organisation led to the increasing adoption of a cohort-wide strategy of horizontal tutor (or ‘Year’) groups.The relative efficacy of these systems has been little researched and only some time ago (notably Rutter, 1982), producing no clear evidence either way in terms of academic outcomes; however, Fincham (1991) argues that a vertical system does allow for more complex relationships to be built up across the school, while Barnard (2011) emphasises that this creates a sense of loyalty to something more like an extended family. With the advent of state secondary schools in England after the Second World War, the term pastoral care came to denote all the things teachers did for their pupils beyond subject-based teaching. In the 1970s and 1980s schools started to forge stronger links with pupils’ families to support their learning, becoming more closely linked with children’s welfare institutions; this integration reached its height with the implementation of the ‘Every Child Matters’ strategy in 2003, which sought to integrate responsibility of duty of care for children across schools and the medical profession. Notably, a significant backtrack on this policy has taken place under the Coalition and Conservative Governments since 2010, defunding and reducing integration between the education and health sectors. In these definitions and shifts of policy, practice and culture there is a tension between pastoral care being understood as monitoring and safeguarding on the one hand and regard for holistic development on the other. Parton (2014) has argued that a primary focus on safeguarding will never address the underlying problems that can lead to critical incidents of abuse and neglect; instead we must go beyond ensuring minimum welfare standards and administrative requirements are met towards helping young people develop as persons, with and among others, to feed forward into a healthier future society. For the tutor, this requires getting to know tutees as individuals by fostering trust, openness and reciprocal care. 623

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Ethic of care Nel Noddings first set out her theory in ‘Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education’ (1984). Having grown in popularity and scope, care ethics is now considered a ‘distinct moral theory’ (Held, 2006, p. 3). In more recent writing, Noddings has recognised that the word ‘feminine’ has exclusive connotations, substituting it instead with ‘relational’ (2013, p. xiii): instead of our moral impulses emerging from an abstract ‘should’, she argues, they emerge from a response from the encounter with distinctive people, situations and ideas in the world. In contrast to Kantian ethics and in common with virtue theory, Noddings puts ‘limited faith in principles’ since ‘when a real conflict arises, the principle is of little help. We have to dig behind the principle to see what deeper value has engendered it’ (ibid., p. xv). The motivator for this digging is our prior experience of the satisfaction of giving and receiving ‘natural care’, such as is routinely given by our parents and guardians; ‘ethical care’ follows when the moral complexity of an encounter requires other than a habitual response, often in settings beyond the home such as schools where teachers as carers owe a duty of care to students. Ethical caring ‘does not seek moral credit; it seeks a response from the cared-for that completes the encounter – a recognition that is usually spontaneously offered in natural caring’ (ibid.). A person who tries to behave ethically will try to convert ‘a given relation into a caring relation’ (Noddings, 1988, p. 219) – the restoration of an innately desired state of valuing, and being valued by, others. Noddings’ philosophy draws on Heidegger’s broad definition of care ‘as the very Being of human life’ (2013, p. 40): a desire to relate to others that forms the core of our existence. Crucially, the caring relation is necessarily reciprocal, even when not equal: ‘both parties must contribute to it … A failure on the part of either carer or cared-for blocks completion of caring and, although there may still be a relation … it is not a caring relation’ (Noddings 2005, p.15). She stresses that caring is not a virtue practiced by an individual as it can only be manifested in response to the distinct nature and needs of the recipient in context. A would-be caring action is validated by the appreciative response – whether that is a baby’s gurgle or a teenager’s infinitesimal nod. Thus caring is a situated interpersonal, or dialogic, phenomenon rather than a personal characteristic. Caring is not, however, a purely affective process – imagining oneself into others’ place is a cognitive challenge also. This is central to the reaching out of care beyond immediate personal relationships towards wider communities, to objects and ideas. Noddings cites Broudy’s term ‘enlightened cherishing’ (2005, p. 20) to describe the feeling we may come to have, through dedicated study and experience, towards a piece of carefully wrought handicraft, a favourite work of art or to a principle such as social justice. In these examples we cannot form an equivalent reciprocal relationship with the object of our care; nonetheless, Noddings mentions Robert Frost’s claim that ‘a poem finds its own way’ and notes that, to the connoisseur, ‘well-tended engines purr’;‘The care we exert induces something like a response from fields of ideas and from inanimate objects’ (ibid.). In responses to criticisms that her theory left too great a gap between immediate and abstracted care, and thus struggled to explain how we might learn to care about those we do not know personally (Smeyers, 1999), Noddings developed her position to show how the sympathetic and cognitive elements of care could combine to promote care for strangers and for the ‘living and non-living world’ (2005, p. 150), in a rippling out from the close and personal to the abstract and universal. Finally, Noddings recognises both care for students, and the systematic development of their capacity to care, as moral imperatives in education.This, she argues, requires adjusting the fundamental structures of schooling to value care-giving on a par with, or above, the competitive and abstractedly cognitive aspects that have dominated traditional educational models. 624

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Dialogue as the medium of care Noddings herself recognises the role of dialogue in tailoring the motivational displacement of the carer to the needs of the cared-for. In the following, we propose that a dialogic theory of relating and educating strongly corresponds to, and can further underpin, ethic of care. There are two intertwining strands of dialogic theory. One stems from the insight of the psychologist Vygotsky that ‘the true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to some state of socialization, but from the social to the individual’ (1962, p. 29).This has shaped a tradition of sociocultural theory that has in turn influenced educational research (Hennessy et al., 2016) – in particular, on ‘exploratory talk’ (Mercer & Littleton, 2007) and ‘Accountable Talk’ (Michaels, O’Connor & Resnick, 2008). Their research principally focuses on improving learning outcomes through the creation of a classroom climate and teacher education approaches that are conducive to dialogue. From this perspective, dialogue is principally a powerful means to the end of improved learning.The other strand draws on the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, who focused on the process of dialogue itself as an inherently valuable form of humane interaction (for him, via texts) that pursues new understandings. Wegerif has coined the term ‘dialogic space’ as that which opens up when ‘two or more irreducibly different perspectives are held together in a relationship of proximity’ (2011, p. 182) and from which new meanings emerge as a result of the participants’ attempts – only ever partially successful – to see the world through the others’ eyes. Bakhtin recognises that this form of encounter goes beyond the mere exchange of ideas:‘A person enters into dialogue as an integral voice. He participates in it not only with his thoughts, but with his fate and his entire individuality’ (1984, p. 296). Biesta has since interpreted this as ‘the beautiful risk of education’ (2015), which is fundamentally an ethical encounter; he builds on Dewey’s notion of education in a democratic society as a form of ‘associated living, a conjoint, communicated experience’ (Dewey 1916/1966, p. 5) and on the relational ethics of Levinas. This understanding of dialogue as primarily a theory of ethics does not negate its pedagogical value; Wegerif argues that: ‘the metaphor of space allows us to speak of the opening, closing, widening and deepening of a space all of which moves prove to be useful in the classroom’ (2011, p. 180). However, it sees dialogue as a desirable form of shared life and thus as an end in itself.This broad interpretation is distinct from more technical linguistic definitions, such as Linell’s ‘interaction between co-present individuals through symbolic means’ (1998, p. 12), in the first strand of dialogic thought identified previously; we suggest that Noddings’ ethics of care neatly dovetails into the latter strand.

Building student agency through dialogue Noddings’ concept of the rippling out of care from the intimate to the abstract complements Wegerif ’s notion of widening and deepening dialogic space; indeed, she identifies dialogue as the mechanism for expanding and deepening care relations from people to principles. She does not, however, explore the opportunities for this space of dialogue to become an intentional site for the generation of caring activity in the school and wider world. By her own argument previously, holding principles is not enough; for them to be meaningful, one must recognise circumstances that require a distinctive response to uphold them. As the pragmatist Charles Peirce put it, ‘belief is a rule for action’ (1878, p. 290); an ethic of care must become manifest in student activity. Ranson and colleagues term this responsive, active understanding of belief ‘agency’: Learning is becoming. It is an unfolding through which we learn not only what makes us unique – what individuates us – but how we can learn to make that distinctive agency work in the world. (1996, p. 14) 625

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A student’s ‘uniqueness’ is thus not inherent but emerges as he or she responds to others with care – protecting and enhancing others’ agency rather than exercising power over them. Bauman identifies this valuing of the difference in the other as the ethical basis for forging a shared future: One needs to also respect them – and respect them precisely in their otherness, in the preferences they have made, in their right to make preferences … My link with the other is revealed as responsibility … It is revealed, in other words, as commonality of destiny, not mere resemblance of fate. Shared fate would do with mutual tolerance; joint destiny requires solidarity. (Bauman, 1993, p. 14) Higham (2016) has called this shaping of students’ dispositions towards moral, responsive forms of engagement with difference ‘developing responsible leadership’. His study of teenagers on an outdoor education course showed that, when given challenging group tasks in unfamiliar situations with little adult support, their initial failures prompted deep reflection and lasting insight into the value of others’ different perspectives in helping them re-evaluate their own. Within the classroom, and with teachers as the principle source of challenge rather than the environment, Biesta has called this approach a ‘pedagogy of interruption’ (2010, p. 73). Tutor time, which is both extra-curricular and classroom-based, is a hybrid characterised by verbal dialogue more than by explicit action but focused on real problems in the world and in students’ lives. A dialogic approach within an ethic of care seeks to draw on a range of perspectives as a resource to enrich understandings of those challenges and to prepare students to act ethically in response. A year-long attempt to create and evaluate such an approach is detailed as follows.

Methodology An ethic of care regards the caring relation as ‘ontologically basic’ (Noddings, 2012, p. 771). In operationalising it to research pastoral care, we drew on the feminist tradition (Sander-Staudt, 2006), educational emancipation theory (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2011) and a sociocultural model of dialogic space (Hennessy et al., 2016).The main research question was as follows: To what extent, and in what ways, can the promotion of an ethic of care help a Year 5 to 8 vertical tutor group to better respond to some of their perceived present and future challenges? The study employed a Participatory Action Research approach, where researchers and participants fully share aspects of the research process ‘to undertake emancipatory projects’ (Olesen, 2011 p. 137) as its distinguishing feature is ‘its advocacy of empowerment and emancipation’ (Cohen et al., 2011, p. 348). The practitioner was the teacher/researcher, and the co-tutor and 11 tutees, aged 9–13, were co-researchers. It took place over one calendar year, constituting ‘longitudinal qualitative research’ (Saldaña, 2003, p. 1), which allowed an examination of the ‘relationship between time, talk, and learning in classroom life’ (Mercer, 2008, p. 35). De Vynck began the PAR period by starting an open, exploratory discussion with students about the nature of dialogue and how it is similar and different to chat and conversation. He introduced ethic of care practically through dividing tutees into three cross-age ‘care groups’ for the year, in which they discussed various student-generated issues without teacher intervention.

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The groups then fed back into whole-class discussions. Due to space restrictions only two of these, selected to illustrate key emergent themes, are reported here: one from near the beginning and another from three months into the year. Data on the intervention were collected through recording, transcribing, coding and analysing key passages of classroom dialogue and through the teacher/researcher’s critical reflective journal. In line with the BERA ethical guidelines (2018), parents and tutees were asked to opt into the research process. They were informed of the Head’s role as gatekeeper, their right of withdrawal and anonymisation though aliases. Due to a lack of any set standards for transcribing dialogue (Flick, 2014), transcripts were freely adapted from Jefferson’s transcription notation (Flick, Von Kardorff & Steinke, 2004 p. 249). These were coded in two ways. First, a thematic analysis (Boyatzis, 1998) iteratively coded transcripts using Nvivo software. Second, the Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (SEDA), developed through an in-depth engagement with the theoretical and empirical aspects of the field of educational dialogue, was applied to transcripts to investigate ‘levels of dialogicality’ (Hennessy et al., 2016, p. 3). Individual codes were used to highlight dialogic moves in the transcripts (code number in italics; key in Figure 43.1). Students’ ages are given in brackets after their first appearance.

Findings Reflecting on personal responsibility The first dialogue invited students to reflect on the recent implementation of a new, stricter school-wide discipline policy. Students were encouraged to move between their experiences as subjects of this policy and a more dispassionate critical perspective; this shift is apparent early in the conversation: Teacher:

How do you feel, any ideas about the new management we have in the school … Alex? Alex (12): It’s definitely more strict … I think … it might be harsh, but then at the same time it’s pushing you to … work harder to not lose any time-outs. (B2) Riley (12): Yeah, I think so. Rob (10): And also … if you lose 30 time-outs you’re going to get expelled in only one term. (B1) T: How do you feel about that, Alex? And remember, these are questions you can ask each other too, ok? Alex: Well, it’s definitely scary, because I just don’t want to slip up that much, but still I think it’s making me work harder. (R2) T: Is it having that effect? Alex: Yeahhhh Teacher: … as much as, would we say, it annoys you, or have you made peace with it? (I6) Alex: Uhhh, definitely made peace with it now, and starting to … get along … with it. (B2) While most early contributions to this dialogue, such as Rob’s, focus fearfully on escalating punishments, Alex balances immanent emotion with a more dispassionate appraisal of effects on his

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I – Invite elaboration or reasoning

R – Make reasoning explicit

I1

Ask for explanation or justification of another’s contribution

R1

Explain or justify another’s contribution

I2

Invite building on / elaboration / (dis)agreement / evaluation of another’s contribution or view

R2

Explain or justify own contribution

I3

Invite possibility thinking based on another’s contribution

R3

Speculate or predict on the basis of another’s contribution

I4

Ask for explanation or justification

R4

Speculate or predict

I5

Invite possibility thinking or prediction

I6

Ask for elaboration or clarification

P – Positioning and Coordination

B – Build on ideas B1

Build on /clarify others' contributions

B2

Clarify/elaborate own contribution

P1

Synthesise ideas

P2

Evaluate alternative views

P3

Propose resolution

C1

Refer back

P4

Acknowledge shift of position

C2

Make learning trajectory explicit

P5

Challenge viewpoint

C3

Link learning to wider contexts

P6

State (dis)agreement/ position

C4

Invite inquiry beyond the lesson

C – Connect

RD – Reflect on dialogue or activity

G – Guide direction of dialogue or activity

RD1

Talk about talk

G1

Encourage student-student dialogue

RD2

Reflect on learning process/ purpose/ value/ outcome

G2

Propose action or inquiry activity

RD3

Invite reflection about process/ purpose/ value/ outcome of learning

G3

Introduce authoritative perspective

G4

Provide informative feedback

E – Express or invite ideas

G5

Focusing

Invite opinions/beliefs/ ideas

G6

Allow thinking time

E1

[optional when not verbally explicit]

E2

Make other relevant contribution

Figure 43.1 The Cam-UNAM Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (SEDA: ©2015) was developed by a research team from the University of Cambridge, UK, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, led by Sara Hennessy and Sylvia Rojas-Drummond and funded through a grant from the British Academy. The original scheme and list of co-creators are available at http://tinyurl.com/BAdialogue.

Creating an ‘ethic of care’

behaviour; the teacher’s requests for clarification help Alex to express a transition in emotions from fear to acceptance. At this stage, the teacher is still ‘gatekeeping’ the conversation – that is, student comments are largely directed and filtered through him; soon after, he makes an explicit move to counter this: T:

So you’ve got to pay attention carefully and listen up … you can ask questions of each other … I’ll just listen carefully. (G1) [several seconds of silence] (G6) Riley: On your question on the management (G5), I……. ahhhh…. Half agree with Alex (P6). Three time-outs is very harsh … to get a minus mark … Riley’s overly formal phrasing here suggests a self-conscious step into the dialogic space the teacher opens up by partly contrasting his position with Alex’s. He goes on to make an extended argument (not quoted here), comparing the system with that of another school which he knows of (C3) and recognising that the new deputy head is prepared to adjust the new system in response to concerns – which again suggests a sense of reduced hierarchy in which students and teachers are together negotiating the best policy.

A nascent culture of dialogue The teacher plays little part in the subsequent discussion, prompting other interventions designed to promote wider and deeper dialogue, for example: Raf (12):  ummm, are there any more points on time-outs? (I2) … Riley:    Does anybody else want to say something? (E1) Collectively, these and other contributions suggest a move towards collective responsibility for the progression of the dialogue. In doing so, they mirror the shift in the substantive discussion from individual fear and blame towards collective participation, understanding and increased agency. There is, however, some resistance. Towards the end of this discussion, the teacher invites students to reflect on how the dialogic approach to tutor time is working so far and how it might be improved (RD3). When the teacher invites a student who has remained quiet so far to respond: Adnan (11): [reticent and slow] Umm, I think uh it’s great because we do a lot of creative stuff in our tutor group. We discuss about dialogue and stuff that happens in the news……. And yeah. T:   But when we said that earlier; I am going to put you on the spot now, you didn’t seem to like it, Adnan, so is that just because you’d want to be doing other stuff? While the teacher’s hedging remarks acknowledge the uncomfortable probing nature of his comments – he judges that Adnan is just telling him what he thinks he wants to hear – he demonstrates a commitment to building a culture of trust and honesty that authentic dialogue requires.

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Charity and care The second transcript is from a discussion three months later, for which Adnan has prepared a presentation on sportsmanship and respect. While an initial focus on football helps begin the discussion, it quickly changes tack following this contribution: Cliff (11): If I had a load of money I would give a lot of it to charity coz then you actually help somebody and I want to make the world a better place. (E2) This disarmingly open comment, running the risk of ridicule as well as acclaim, was made in rejection of the previous comments about desiring wealth and fame. It prompts an extended dialogue characterised by critical reflection on different positions: Raf:

I think maybe sometimes giving money to charity is good but then you don’t know what’s going to happen with that money, whereas … Yes, you should give money to charity but also if you give like clothes and actual physical objects … you know that they’re actually going to get used whereas, because some of the money is just going to get wasted. (P6; R2)

… Riley:

there is a charity called x and they have been in the news lately …, they have been taking the old people’s money and giving it to other companies to help them get richer … (C3; B1) Adnan: Yeah Riley: … and making the old people pay more money for their gas and everything … [Charities will] give about 90% to the people who actually need it, but they need to get some income. They take 10% and that’s like their worker’s salaries and everything … and so question is:Would you like it if you know that, um … some of your hard-earned money, it’s not actually going to what you believe in, and it’s just being wasted … ? (B1; I3) Steve: But wouldn’t the charities close down if they didn’t take some money? They need some money. (R3) Riley: Exactly! Exactly, I’m just putting the point forward that you … (RD1) Raf ’s simple statement leads to a complex discussion around the need for, role of and possible abuses of charity (in this case, an inflated energy tariff). It is again characterised by peer dialogue, bypassing the teacher, that pursues a line of thinking through questioning, elaboration and example. Riley deliberately asks others to put themselves in the shoes of those donating in the knowledge of possible waste or fraud; Steve follows through on the implications of Riley’s statement; Riley responds by referring explicitly to his attempts to constructively shape the dialogue. These dialogic moves, relatively rare in classrooms, seem to be spurred by their relevance to their lives – conundrums they want to resolve. The discussion extends to explore the pros and cons of cash versus material charitable gifts. As time runs out, Raf is eager to share a story he read about and persists in telling the teacher even as other students start to leave and are distracted by a sharing out of sweets: Raf:

There was a girl and, uh, she, uh … was knocked over by a truck, and then, a few seconds later, a motorbike rode over her, and then after that 18 more people walked past her rather than helping her. And it was from the 630

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fact that….....uh………. The Good Samaritan, that the two priests and the Levites walked past the…… the Jew that was lying there. And the Samaritan, his enemy, took, took him to the inn, gave the innkeeper money to look after him, bandaged his wounds up, used … Teacher: And he wasn’t even supposed to be a nice guy, hey? Raf: They hated each other, the Samaritans and the Jews, but he but he put aside his religious prejudices and, prejudices and uhhhhh….. helped him … Amrit (12): Good. Raf feels compelled here to relate this affecting story, connecting it to scripture even though he has not formed an argument or conclusion he can articulate. Similarly to Cliff ’s earlier contribution about charitable giving, it demonstrates emotional openness and lack of artifice – both of which might invite ridicule – that belie stereotypes of a masculine adolescent culture and suggest a shift towards a dialogic ethic of care. Amrit, who has been only an occasional contributor to the dialogues, is compelled to listen even though he is free to leave. He offers Raf emotional support for his story, seeming to recognise that Raf is not making a specific point but expressing a sense of connectedness across distance and hope for the future.

Discussion These short transcripts offer two glimpses into the interactions between the teacher and tutees at different parts of the year. The first transcript shows that when the teacher explicitly pulls out of the discussion, these students were ready, willing and able (despite initial hesitancy and awkwardness) to fill the vacuum.They implicitly follow ground rules such as ensuring wide participation and making others feel heard. They spontaneously used a wide range proven dialogic ‘moves’ identified by the SEDA scheme to advance and deepen the conversation, supporting the view of dialogue as a useful pedagogical tool (Mercer & Littleton, 2007). The topics discussed were extra-curricular and focused on the students’ feelings, opinions and experience, reducing the perception of right or wrong answers; this is likely to have encouraged openness and honesty and reduced fear of failure. However, the teacher’s move to bring them on the inside of the discussion of school behaviour policy as co-agents rather than recipients was also empowering.This is less of a pedagogically dialogic move than a relationally dialogic one, inviting students to expand their circle of caring from the intimate to the abstract by relating first to others, then to a community and its principles. We see in the discussions of school rules and charity – and elsewhere in their discussions of valued activities and relationships in tutor time – a move beyond exchanging ideas towards expressions of solidarity and commitment relating to present and future situations. Many times in his reflective journal and transcription notes, De Vynck acknowledges his own failings in this regard: over-steering the dialogue, not leaving sufficient pause, and gatekeeping. Encouraging dialogue as an end in itself represents a challenging break from tradition for most teachers, requiring both practice and slow cultural change. Remarkable in these transcripts, however, is the level of emotional honesty and a rippling sense of care for others. As Higham has discussed elsewhere, it is easy to dismiss the moral agonies of privileged schoolchildren around charity (Higham & Djohari, 2018), yet their desire to act consistently in line with their values in response to dilemmas such as personal responsibility and the proper exercise of charity is clearly visible here. This illustrative case suggests that the creation of an intentional space of dialogue around present and future challenges within the school day, outside curriculum and peer group norms, can enable both pedagogically and rela631

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tionally dialogic interactions.These dialogues make a case for considering investment of schools’ energy in tutor time to support the development of children’s sense of personal and collective agency within and beyond the school. They demonstrate many of the features identified by the SEDA scheme as indicating valuable dialogic engagement. Finally, they illustrate how creating an ethic of care in a tutor group can provide a social and ethical platform upon which emotionally risky personal and moral topics can be discussed securely.

References Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. London: University of Minneapolis Press. Barnard, P. A. (2011). Vertical Tutoring. Grosvenor House Publishing. Bates, A. (2017). The management of ‘emotional labour’ in the corporate re-imagining of primary education in England. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 26(1), 66–81. Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodernity, or living with ambivalence. In J. Natoli & L. Hutcheon (Eds.), A Postmodern Reader. New York: SUNY. BERA. (2018). Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (4th ed.). London: British Educational Research Association. Best, R. (2014). Forty years of Pastoral Care: An appraisal of Michael Marland’s seminal book and its significance for pastoral care in schools. Pastoral Care in Education, 32(3), 173–185. Biesta, G. (2010). Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Biesta, G. (2015). The Beautiful Risk of Education. London: Routledge. Boyatzis, R. (1998). Transforming Qualitative Information: Thematic Analysis and Code Development. London: Sage. Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2011). Research Methods in Education. London: Routledge. Department for Education. (2013). The National Curriculum. London: Crown Copyright. Department for Education. (2016). Educational Excellence Everywhere. London: Crown Copyright. Dewey, J. (1966). Democracy and Education. New York: The Free Press. Fincham, D. (1991). Horizontal or vertical? Integrating pastoral and academic concerns. School Organisation, 11(2), 241–251. Flick, U. (2014). An Introduction to Qualitative Research. Sage. Flick, U., Von Kardorff, E., & Steinke, I. (2004). What is qualitative research? In Flick, Von Kardorff, and Steinke (eds.) A Companion to Qualitative Research. London: Sage. Held,V. 2006, The Ethics of Care, Oxford University Press Hennessy, S., Rojas-Drummond, S., Higham, R., Márquez, A-M., Maine, F., Ríos, R-M., García-Carrión, R., Torreblanca, O., & Barrera, M-J. (2016). Developing a coding scheme for analysing classroom dialogue across educational contexts. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 9, 16–44. Higham, R. (2016). Communication breakdown: How conflict can promote responsible leadership in students. School Leadership & Management, 36(1), 96–112. Higham, R., & Djohari, N. (2018). From voting to engaging: Promoting democratic values in an international school network. Oxford Review of Education, 44(6), 669–685. Linell, P. (1998). Approaching Dialogue: Talk, Interaction and Contexts in Dialogical Perspectives (Vol. 3). John Benjamins Publishing. Longfield, A. (2017). Children’s Mental Healthcare in England (Briefing). London: Children’s Commissioner for England. Marland, M. (1974). Pastoral Care. London: Heinmann. Mercer, N. (2008). The seeds of time: Why classroom dialogue needs a temporal analysis. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 17(1), 33–59. Mercer, N., & Littleton, K. (2007). Dialogue and the Development of Children’s Thinking: A Sociocultural Approach. London: Routledge. Michaels, S., O’Connor, C., & Resnick, L. (2008). Deliberative discourse idealized and realized: Accountable talk in the classroom and civic life. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27(4), 283–297. Morgan, N. (2017). Taught Not Caught: Educating for 21st Century Character. Melton, Woodbridge: John Catt Educational Ltd. Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

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44 THE POWER OF A DIALOGICAL FRAMEWORK TO ARTICULATE COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN THE 21ST CENTURY Yifat Ben-David Kolikant and Sarah Pollack

The importance of knowledge creation and collaboration skills in the 21st century Life in the 21st century involves new challenges and requires developing different skills than were previously required. Today’s students will function in a rapidly changing world and work under conditions of increasing uncertainty and risk. Our world today is characterized by (at least) four major trends: (a) digitalism, that is, the rapid proliferation of ICT and social media and their increasing role in everyday life; (b) a Knowledge Society, or related terms, such as a Knowledge Economy, a knowledge age, and a Learning Society, which highlight the nature of certain societal changes (Välimaa & Hoffman, 2008) in which knowledge is assuming greater importance than ever before (Drucker, 1993), and dynamic epistemology—perceptions of knowledge as evolving, constantly changing—which governs knowledge-related practices; (c) globalism, that is, enjoying the wealth of but also facing the need to compete in a global market; and (d) multi-culturalism, since due to technological and immigration trends, people are exposed to myriad, often conflicting voices and worldviews. The importance of nurturing collaboration skills is straightforward. Collaboration can ease ongoing work-life of problem solving and knowledge creation. The trends of globalization and multi-culturalism emphasize that in such collaborative settings we might encounter voices different from and even contradictory to our own. Being able and willing not only to tolerate but also to collaborate with and learn by interacting with these others is an important asset. Hence, it is important that schools provide opportunities and support students’ knowledge-creation abilities and dispositions in addition to enhancing their communication and collaboration skills.

Convergence: A common conceptualization of successful learning in collaborative contexts Much work has been invested in better understanding and theorizing (computer-supported) learning in collaborative contexts (see, for example, the review by Dillenbourg, Jarvela, &

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Fischer, 2009; Stahl, Koschmann, & Suthers, 2006; and the work by Ludvigsten, 2016). Typically, in collaborative contexts, people are supposed to construct knowledge by working together on complex tasks and problems and arriving at joint solutions (Weinberger, Stegmann, & Fischer, 2007).The idea behind putting students in collaborative settings is that they can positively influence each other when learning together (Weinberger et al., 2007; Noroozi, Teasley, Biemans, Weinberger, & Mulder, 2013). Weinberger et al. (2007), as many others, emphasize one aspect of such a positive influence, that of knowledge convergence (see also, for example, Jeong & Chi, 2007; Fischer & Mandl, 2005; Teasly et al., 2008): One important aspect of this mutual influence is that knowledge is shared and converges through social interaction (Barron, 2003; Roschelle, 1996; Ickes & Gonzales, 1996). Knowledge convergence has been conceptualized as a group-level phenomenon describing how two or more individuals, in socially interacting, are or become similar with respect to their knowledge. (p. 416) According to Weinberger et al. (2007), “Learners who converge in knowledge have been found to benefit more from collaborative learning than learners who did not” (p. 416). Such a process involves transactive discussions (Noroozi et al., 2013). Transactivity refers to the extent to which learners act on each other’s reasoning (Teasley, 1997), their joint constructions (Howe, 2009). This view stresses the importance of the quality of the process of collaboration, which should involve in-depth discussions, the investment of mental effort, and the weighing of alternatives raised by peers. Two sub-types of such successful collaborative processes are described in the literature: (a) an integration-oriented consensus and (b) a conflict-oriented consensus. In the former, participants build on one another’s utterances by integrating and synthesizing their perspectives and ideas. The latter, on the other hand, involves critical argumentation: faced with disagreement, critique, and alternative ideas, learners are pushed to examine and revise their ideas until reaching a consensus (Teasly, 1997; Weinberger & Fischer, 2006). Participants’ knowledge growth in these cases is typically assumed to involve the assimilation of ideas that are constructed jointly within the group (Howe, 2009). Howe (2009) claims that there are other mechanisms by which learners benefit from collaborative discussions, another type of positive influence of one learner on another, in particular, when the assimilation of a joint construction is not possible. Specifically, she noticed that sometimes students performed in delayed individual posttests better than they performed as a group. She described a process in which as learners discuss their ideas, unresolved contradictions in their knowledge are revealed, for example, when other learners point out what triggered a process of knowledge growth following the collaborative activity. Participants’ divergence in knowledge is a promising starting point. It is a means to enhance the depth of learning in collaborative settings, since it can serve as a trigger for attaining a deeper and broader understanding of the topic (Schwartz, 1995, Fischer & Mandel, 2005). However, divergence does not always lead to transactive discussions. The participants’ approach to the discussion, manifested by different discursive goals and acts, might reduce the range of discursive acts and may lead to avoidance or insufficient treatment of important arguments and evidence (Barron, 2003; Felton, Garcia-Mila, & Gilabert, 2009; Johnson & Johnson, 2009).

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Specifically, Felton et al. (2009) distinguish between deliberative discourse and disputative discourse (see also Mercer, 1995). They describe four basic responses that one can take when confronted with an opposing claim: (1) to dismiss counter-arguments and maintain their position; (2) to agree with counterarguments locally, but deflect their impact by turning to other claims in support of their position; (3) to integrate counterarguments by qualifying or adjusting their position; or, (4) to accept counterarguments and abandon their position. (p. 422) In disputative discourse, the students’ goal is to persuade, to defend a certain viewpoint, and to undermine alternatives. To this end, students might limit their discursive actions to the first two. In deliberative or exploratory discourse (Mercer, 2000), the goal is to arrive at a coherent, consensual explanation by weighing the various pieces of evidence. With such a goal in mind, individuals are more likely to allow themselves the full range of the previous responses. The dynamics by which participants’ knowledge evolves in these cases, in which all group members unite in a joint effort to increase their shared understanding, was termed joint exploration (Roschelle & Teasly, 1995; Schwartz, 1995). The theoretical constructs of convergence or the assimilation of group joint construction seems less useful for articulating successful collaborative learning in the Humanities. For example, a deliberate discussion of a text or a source in any other form (e.g., historical texts, poems, speeches, movies, and political manifestos) might not lead to increased similarity (i.e., convergence) in participants’ knowledge of that source; yet it may be successful. Fruitful discussions in this context might simply lead to enhancing one’s understanding of the text, an awareness of the multiplicity of voices, the subjectivity, and the interpretive nature of the knowledge related to this text, as well as to attaining a better understanding of other people and their worldviews (Parker, 2006). Exploring other conceptualizations of successful collaboration is important in an era of increasing globalization of multi-culturalism. Vast empirical work exists on minority students, who frequently experience difficulties when they study history and are asked to “converge” into the majority narrative, because the narratives presented in class conflict with those they encounter within their own ethnic collective (e.g., Almarza, 2001; Banks & Banks, 2009; Barton & Levstik, 1998; Epstein, 1998, 2000; Wertsch, 2000; Goldberg, Schwarz, & Porat, 2011). Finally, the convergence metaphor might not align well with the educational goal of nurturing 21st-century skills, such as life-long learning skills and dispositions. Life-long learning is about ongoing refinement of one’s knowledge. This knowledge could be gained from interactions with others, regardless of whether they share the same goals or whether the process would eventually result in increased knowledge of those involved in it. It is concerned with creating new knowledge and evaluating the knowledge created by others, often in the absence of clear-cut established criteria. Often people desire collegial peers and a collegial atmosphere, in order to present, get feedback, and refine their ideas in light of this feedback. However, the final idea, even though it may have benefitted from the peer work, does not belong to the group, and the group members’ ideas do not necessarily converge to or reflect one’s refined ideas. Moreover, although all group members are potentially enriched from this situation, they invest in and gain from the collaboration differently (Akkerman, Admiral, & Simons, 2012).

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A dialogic conceptualization of successful learning in collaborative settings We suggest another conceptualization of successful collaboration, which highlights participants’ impact on one another, regardless of whether they converged in their ideas, i.e., their ideas become similar. We were inspired by Bakhtin’s (1981; 1986) dialogical stance, especially the notion of “Internally Persuasive Discourse”, which we will now explain. According to Bakhtin, our entire being exists in a continuous dialogue with the surrounding world. The language is the medium through which we communicate our voice (ideas, viewpoints, knowledge, beliefs, concerns, and so forth [Wertsch, 1998]). Language is not merely an abstract, neutral semiotic system but rather a venue for ideological encounters and perpetual struggles: At any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between different epochs of the past, between different socioideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given a bodily form. These ‘languages’ of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying ‘languages.’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 291) Therefore, communicating an utterance (utterance refers to a unit of a speech communication) is not about encoding and decoding a message sent by the speaker and received by a listener, relying on linguistic posit per se. Conceptualizing communication merely as such assumes that understanding an utterance is passive, whereas, according to Bakhtin, this understanding is active and responsive.When we utter our voice we use words that previously existed “in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 294). Uttering is active and responsive as we attempt to re-populate these words with our intentions. Listening to an utterance is also active and responsive. The listener not only decodes the utterance—he or she also grasps why it is being said, relates it to his or her own interests and assumptions, and evaluates the type of response it invites (Morson & Emerson, 1990). Hence, the meaning of an utterance exists within the boundaries of (at least) two voices: that of the speaker (who tries to populate words previously used in other people’s mouth for uttering their voices) with his or her intentions and that of the listener, who understands (i.e., populates) it with his or her voice. The concepts of voice, utterance, and the heteroglot nature of language explain why people can and often construct their knowledge of the collaborative situation, of the utterances produced and heard there, differently. We each interact with the same utterance differently, and therefore we can each be enriched from a voice heard differently. Furthermore, a person’s knowledge related to an utterance may include the author(s), context, responses, and relationships with other utterances, contexts, and responses. This is a unique and never finalized knowledge for every person. Relying on Bakhtin’s dialogical stance (1981), we propose the notion of Internally Persuasive Discourse (IPD) (p. 342) to describe an additional conceptualization of successful collaborative learning. In IPD, in contrast to an externally authoritarian discourse, utterances and their meanings are negotiable and modifiable. When engaged in IPD, learners can test and refine their ideas in light of criticism and alternatives provided by the interlocutors. The interlocutors might provide an opportunity for us to realize our own ontological confinements and eventually transcend them. Using Matusov’s (2009) words, IPD puts participants “on the boundaries 637

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of their own truths and [the] truths of others” (Matusov, 2009, p. 248). Successful enactments of IPD do not necessarily require that participants be driven by the same goals, and participants’ voices are not expected to “melt” or “converge” into one voice, not even in part. Moreover, IPD highlights the possibility of asymmetry, whereby each participant may react to and benefit from the collaborative situation differently. The notion of IPD highlights the quality of collaboration as manifested in the dialogic agency developed by the discussants, regardless of whether the similarity between the discussants’ knowledge increased (i.e., whether they converged towards an agreed upon account). IPD is an especially suitable framework in our increasing era of multi-culturalism. It aligns with the premise that culture is continuously under construction, “a product of people hammering each other into shape with the well-structured tools already available” (McDermott & Varenne, 1995, p. 326). Hence, interactional breakdowns or clashes between different voices are not merely inevitable in a multi-voiced society. Rather, they serve as the driving force for discursive change, since “participants are forced to shift their attention from their messages to the interaction itself and their relations” (Matusov, Smith, Candela, & Lilu, 2007, p. 465). Finally, the concept of IPD aligns with the goals of 21st-century schooling because it stresses knowledge creation and the subjectivity of the knowledge produced. It also emphasizes the importance of communication and collaboration as a means for ongoing refinement of knowledge, an important aspect of life-long learning. Here we present an instructional model inspired by the notion of IPD; then we describe two enactments of this model and the learning that occurred.

IPD as a framework to design collaborative educational contexts The model builds on students’ diversity. In the two enactments we carried out, we chose topics related to students’ ontological circumstances and therefore anticipated that the borders between the students’ day-to-day lives and the school assignments would be blurred. The activities that developed within the framework of the model include several important elements. The first element is sources representing different or even contradictory voices regarding the topic at hand. The second element concerns promoting collaboration over competition. In order to achieve this, students should be allowed freedom of choice in deciding whether they agree to write a joint account of the event or submit together an analysis of the differences between their viewpoints. The third element concerns enabling equal opportunities and responsibilities. The fourth element is a gradual exposure to dialogue with the Other. Critically examining ontological truth can be a painful process, especially when your interlocutor challenges aspects of your being (e.g., your morality, courage, and so forth). Therefore, we decided to structure the interaction so that the students would be gradually exposed to dialogue with the different Other, first via texts, then via asynchronous interactions with their peers, and finally through a direct, synchronous dialogue with them. The assignments are thus bi-phasic. In phase 1, students work individually or in homogenous groups, and their interaction with the voice of the Other is through the texts that they receive. Phase 2 is the collaborative phase. In this phase students work on the same assignments as before but within heterogeneous groups. Phase 2 can be divided into sub-phases with increasingly gradual exposure to the Other’s voice. For example, an asynchronous discussion allows students to comment on each other’s answers while having time to deal with their emotions. It thus serves to prepare them for a consecutive sub-phase, of synchronous interaction, in which they have to deal with the Other’s voice more directly and hence, intensively. 638

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Enactment 1 of the instructional model: The Doing History Together project The Doing History Together (DHT) project brought together students from two conflicting groups to collaboratively investigate an event relevant to the joint troubled past of their ingroups, using primary and secondary historical texts. Specifically, we engaged Israeli Jewish students and Israeli Palestinian Arab students (post-primary and higher education students) in a collaborative investigation of events related to the intractable Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Both Israeli and Palestinian narratives encourage zero-sum viewpoints regarding this conflict: “If ‘we’ are right, ‘they’ are surely wrong, and if ‘we’ are victims, ‘they’ are obviously the perpetrators” (Salomon, 2004, p. 276–277). The entire activity took place in a Wiki environment. In the first phase, students worked in ethnically homogenous pairs or individually and uploaded their answers to the assignment questions we composed. In the second phase, bi-ethnic quartets discussed the event first asynchronously and then in a synchronous 90-minute textual e-discussion. They were instructed to come up with either a consensual answer or an explanation of the essence of their disagreement (for a more detailed description of the instructional model and its design rationale, see Pollack & Ben-David Kolikant, 2011).

Fissions: An additional process underlying successful collaborative learning In all the experiments we ran (total of 164 students), the essays produced in phase 1 (either individually or by ethnically homogenous peers) can be described as dichotomous (e.g., Pollack & Ben-David Kolikant, 2011; Ben-David Kolikant & Pollack, 2015). Although all the students received the same sources and the same assignments, the pairs chose to integrate into their essays themes that aligned with their in-group’s narrative and to ignore or reject themes that aligned with the Other-group narrative. Specifically, the APs portrayed their in-group historical agent as the least powerful in comparison to the two other historical agents, the British and the Jews, who cooperated, as part of Britain’s conspiracy to rule in the area at the expense of the Arab historical agent, the victim. The JPs viewed the Jewish and the Arab historical agent as symmetrical, having the same rights, being equally treated by the British, who ruled the area. These results echo the vast empirical work conducted on students’ interactions with multiple historical representations (e.g., Wertsch, 2000), as well as with the zero-sum perceptions of Israelis and Palestinians regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (Salomon, 2004; Bar-Tal & Salomon, 2006). Nonetheless, the majority of the students managed to engage in elaborative discussions in phase 2, i.e., discussions in which new meaning emerged and which resulted in joint essays, agreed upon by all group members (Ben-David Kolikant & Pollack, 2011; 2015). In these essays, the interrelationship between the three historical agents is portrayed differently. The Arab historical agent is no longer equal to the Jewish historical agent like in the JP essays but rather is portrayed as having less power. The Jewish historical agent is not portrayed as equally powerful to the British like in the AP essays. Nonetheless, these essays align with both the Israeli and Palestinian narratives. Our analysis of the dynamics of collaboration in the elaborative e-discussions revealed that most of them took the form we had termed “fission”. We borrowed the term fission from the field of physics, where it denotes a process in which an atom’s structure becomes unstable because of a hit by an external neutron.These discussions resembled those of a conflict-oriented consensus since (a) one (or more) of the interlocutors examined his or her voice in light of alternatives, typically after their peers recognized a flaw or a weakness in one’s argument; and (b) the group produced a consensual answer. 639

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However, in conflict (or integration) oriented consensus types of discussions, the challengers’ questions became a matter for the entire group, and the new knowledge, created as a result, is likely to be recognized by the discussants as group knowledge, i.e., members converge to the group answer (e.g., Dillenbourg & Fischer, 2007; Roschelle & Teasly, 1995), which later could be “assimilated” by the members to answer similar questions. Conversely, in the fission type, the challenges raised by one pair were aimed at and perceived as undermining the arguments of the opposing pair, rather than presenting opportunities for group inquiry. As such, the responsibility for addressing them remained solely in the hands of the “attacked” pair. These challenges then served as didactic or persuasive tools, leading this pair to re-evaluate and revise their viewpoint when responding. The ensuing breakthroughs in understanding the event were therefore a within-pair affair, rather than a shared process. Furthermore, the consequent utterance made by the attacked pair took into account the “attack” and responded to it, yet the responders did not abandon their (in-group) narratives, let alone adopt those of their peers. Moreover, often the response of the attacked couple would reflect a struggle between the voices uttered within the activity. Often this struggle was also evident in the group’s answer and in the individual post-activity essays. Not all attacks, even if well argued, brought about fissions. Usually, discussions started as two parallel monologues (or using Mercer’s (1995) terminology, as dispositional discourse), and only later did participants decide to make their voices heard by the Other (Pollack & Ben-David Kolikant, 2012; Ben-David Kolikant & Pollack, 2015). Here we show an example of one quartet who participated in our study. They discussed the violent event that took place in 1929, known as the “Buraq Uprising” (Palestinian riots) in the Palestinian narrative and the 1929 massacres in the Zionist narrative. In line with other experiments, the influence of the students’ ethnic identity was prominent in the essays they had produced in phase 1 when they worked individually.The following interaction demonstrates the occurrence of fission (for a detailed description of fission, see Pollack & Ben-David Kolikant, 2011, 2012 as well as Ben-David Kolikant & Pollack, 2015, 2017). It took place after the Jewish pair (JP) claimed that they do not “think that the Palestinians lost” (line 70) due to the violent events that erupted in 1929 between Arabs and Jews (a claim raised by the Arab pair [AP]). On the contrary,“the [British] rule became pro-Arab. In contrast, the Jews were harmed by British policy” (lines 71–72). Namely, the JP portrays the Jewish and Arab historical agent as victim and perpetrator, respectively. In the excerpt that follows, the Arab pair (AP) suggested an alternative, opposite description of these interrelations. They presented the Jews as the perpetrators, being harmful to the Arabs (the victims) by refusing to hire them, taking over their land, and so forth (lines 76–81). In this response, the AP illuminated an aspect in the JP’s narrative that the JP did not yet consider: the impact of the actions of the Jewish historical agent on the Arab historical agent. AP

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Moti, why do you think that the Arabs at that time threatened the Jews in their struggle for a state? What were the Jews’ intentions at that time? However, the Palestinians were harmed. The [Jewish] newcomers had almost complete control over the Muslim sites. … and they controlled the country. The economic state of the Arabs deteriorated and they [the Jews] would not agree to hire them. And they [the Jews] controlled most things. Meaning, they took the places [lands], the work, and the livelihood.

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82 83 84 85 86

We didn’t say that. We said the contrary. The Arabs felt threatened. … that the Jews who immigrated to Israel were taking away their jobs and lands. British rule became pro-Arab only after the pra’ot. [the term ‘pra’ot’ is usually used to refer to pogroms]

In response, the JP’s voice was refined; allegedly the JP agreed with the AP’s claim (lines 84–85); however, they rephrased the AP’s claim, expressing a new meaning, located within their own original viewpoint.The AP’s claim was that the Jewish actions harmed the Palestinians (line 75), whereas the JP suggested a weaker claim, that the Palestinians felt threatened (line 84) because of these actions (it is not clear whether these actions really harmed them). Moreover, the JP did not change their core claim, namely, that the “British rule became pro-Arab only after the pra’ot”. Nonetheless, in their response the JP displayed empathy towards the Arab people and noted a certain accountability for the Jewish historical agent “who immigrated to Israel and [Jews] were taking away their jobs and lands” (lines 84–85) for the event. This is the first time that JP referred to Jewish–Arab interrelations. The JP’s portrayal of the Arab historical agent changed. Before that, they portrayed the Arab historical agent as coldly planning the violence merely to promote political goals. This group produced an essay, agreed upon by all its members, in which they indicated that both the Jewish and the Arab historical agents were responsible for the violent event.Their individual post-activity essays (submitted a week or two later), however, did not overlap with the joint text or with one another. Nonetheless, they differed from the essays produced before the collaborative phase of the activity, and moreover, the impact of their peers’ voices was evident. Namely, the voices of the group members did not converge or melt into one unified voice but instead were influenced by the collaboration with one another (Pollack & Ben-David Kolikant, 2012; Ben-David Kolikant & Pollack, 2017). For example, Moti, the Jewish student, did not change his main claims that the British were accountable and that the Arabs benefited from the event (e.g., utterance 71–72 cited previously). Nonetheless, he emphasized the bad relations between the Arabs and the Jews, thereby abandoning the perception of the Jews as weak, and instead assumes that the Jews had a certain responsibility for creating the Arab situation: “if the relations between the Jews and the Arabs were better and they would have felt as partners to live in the country nearby or together with the Jews, maybe the uprisings against the Jews would have been avoided”. This is the same theme uttered by the JP during the discussion (lines 84–85) in response to the AP’s claim. This theme did not appear in his pre-activity essays. Apparently, the collaborative activity had an impact on him. His answer reflected his understanding of the event as a more tangled system of interrelations, in comparison with the rather simplistic victim/perpetrator description in the pre-answers, although he did not abandon the Jewish narrative. To conclude, fissions describe a state when one’s voice becomes embodied in another voice, or using Bakhtin’s (1984; 1991) terminology, a voice becomes more polyphonic. The conceptualization of fission emphasizes that successful collaboration does not necessarily result in pieces of the Other’s voice melting into one’s voice. Furthermore, fission indicates that successful collaboration does not necessarily entail a symmetrical change in the participants’ voices. It needs two (or more) for fission to occur; however, this does not mean that all participants will be impacted, let alone in the same manner. They might even experience the situation differently (Ben-David Kolikant & Pollack, 2009). Correspondingly, participants might not gain the same or similar knowledge from the same collaborative situation. 641

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Enactment 2 of the instructional model: The Interlaced Roots project Interlaced Roots (IR) builds on an existing unit in the Israeli curriculum for junior-high schools, in which students study their families’ heritages (i.e., “roots”) individually. We added a consecutive phase in which students form mixed-culture pairs and jointly investigate the narratives of both families, the similarities and differences between the narratives, as well as the circumstances that shaped them. This activity was carried out via a Wiki environment. The topic of investigation in the experiment described here was the formal education of family members. Similarly to the DHT project, we built on students’ (multi-)cultural backgrounds.The Jewish population in Israel derives from myriad diasporas, and there are past and present tensions, such as between Ashkenazi Jews (who emigrated from Europe) and Mizrahi Jews (who emigrated from Muslim countries) and the tensions between newcomers from the Soviet Union and Ethiopia and old-timers, and so forth. These tensions sometimes arise from public and political discourses (Smooha, 2005). Like in the DHT project, the activity has two phases. For phase 1, the individual phase, participants were asked to interview their families about their formal education, investigate the relevant historical contexts, and upload to a designated Wiki environment the narratives of three generations: themselves, their parents, and their grandparents. In phase 2, the collaborative phase, students were grouped into pairs and were requested to compare their narratives (similarities and differences) and compose a joint narrative. They were also asked to report their individual reflections on the activity after each phase.

A different texture of IPD Ten graduate students from the School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem participated in this activity: three males and seven females, and comprised five pairs. Three pairs were Ashkenazi and Mizrahi students, and two pairs were ethnically homogeneous (either Mizrahi or Ashkenazi). We conducted narrative and discourse analyses on all the texts that the participants uploaded to the Wiki environment, including the comments and questions they asked each other and their reflections. The comparison between the individual essays before and after the activity and the joint essays, using narrative analysis methods, revealed that five (out of ten) students had changed their narratives; of these, four worked in ethnically heterogeneous pairs. Here, we describe one pair. We present the initial narrative of each student, the interaction between them, and the changes in the narrative if evident. This pair consisted of Veronica (Mizrahi) and Mary (Ashkenazi). In her initial narrative, Veronica criticized her family for not investing in education. Her mother was the only family member who had graduated from (vocational) school, and Veronica asked her why she had not attended a better school. In the joint essay, however, she changed her attitude and expressed her pride and amazement of her mother, who now was portrayed as managing relatively well despite the harsh circumstances and even managed to graduate from high school. Her peer, Mary, first unquestionably accepted her grandfather’s description of himself as an ignoramus because he did not have a formal education. In the joint essays, however, she questioned this definition, given his efforts to informally widen his horizons (e.g., he mastered four languages, read history books, and so forth). Their interaction seems to align with the description of the joint exploration. The questions that were raised by each of them triggered processes of data gathering, information searching, and meaning making, which were carried out by the pair together. Gradually, through these 642

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vivid discussions, they formulated a consensual essay. The essay also included topics they disagreed on and the perspective of each of them on those topics. This work process was common among all ten participants. However, there were also signs of asymmetry, of the influence of one interlocutor on the other. The collaboration with their peers stimulated students to examine their own, personal story in light of alternatives that emerged from their peers’ narrative or from the questions raised. Neither Mary nor Veronica mentioned the Ashkenazi/Mizrahi cultural differences in their individual stories. However, this issue emerged in their discussions. The question that bothered them the most was how did the Ashkenazi man, Mary’s grandfather, manage to learn informally, whereas the Mizrahi woman, Veronica’s grandmother, remained illiterate? Was it a personal choice or did society guide them differently? Eventually, each changed her narrative. Their reflection on their collaborative process implied that IPD had occurred: Each of us looked at the other and at the joint story, and this scrutiny caused both of us to re-phrase the individual stories, in a way that reflected the new insight we each obtained about ourselves. There was little engagement of each of us in each other’s story. It was used to contrast our own story or as leverage to better understand it. Thus, IPD explains the learning that occurred in this collaborative context. In contrast, the conceptualization of convergence does not explain the insights each student gained about herself during the collaboration, which was the gist of this activity.

Conclusions As shown previously, both enactments of the instructional model generated opportunities for students to learn by means of the other’s voice, which brought about successful collaborative learning that cannot be fully explained by the conceptual framework of convergence, but it can be explained by the alternative framework we proposed, that of IPD. Furthermore, our studies indicate that there is shared as well as unshared knowledge gained, which is the gist of collaboration. This unshared knowledge is given less attention when successful collaboration is conceptualized as convergence. The growth in one’s unshared knowledge was also articulated by Howe (2009). She identified processes in which the collaboration, although it did not necessarily end with a joint solution, triggered a post-collaboration learning process, since students became aware of unresolved contradictions in their knowledge. In both our studies, we highlight situations in which students’ learning and the impact of the peers’ voices on them were evident during the collaborative situations. IPD supports making meaning in situations in which the collaborative setting stimulates students to critically reflect on what they know or think they know, while being aware of possible alternative viewpoints, and thereby nurtures students’ dialogic agency, that is, their awareness of the dynamic and subjective nature of one’s voice. These features align with the schooling goals of the 21st century, emphasizing nurturing ongoing knowledge-creation skills as well as collaboration skills. We also believe that IPD-oriented education is potentially a means for fostering cohesion in multi-cultural societies. IPD highlights the uniqueness of each voice and at the same time, the multiplicity and multivocality of our existence. In addition, it conveys a message of legitimacy to disagree with the other, as long as his or her voice was heard and respectfully taken into account in the upcoming response. 643

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In order to successfully utilize the fostering of IPD as an educational approach, several aspects should be taken into consideration. IPD highlights that fruitful collaboration can be asymmetric in terms of the learning processes and outcomes. For example, it is possible and even probable that students would gain differently from an activity when engaged in IPD. Moreover, as with any approach that emphasizes the students’ voice, which nurtures students’ agency, tensions between the students and the content-related curricular goals are to be anticipated. Finally, more work is required to explore other ways to generate IPD, the differences and nuances in the discursive regimes generated in various collaborative contexts, as well as the learning that occurs. Both enactments resulted in vivid and hot discussions. In both enactments, students discussed their personal truths, their identity, in light of alternative ideas. Yet probably due to the different relevant socio-political macro contexts, they differed in their essence.

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45 THE POTENTIAL OF HALAQAH TO BE A TRANSFORMATIVE ISLAMIC DIALOGIC PEDAGOGY Farah Ahmed

Introduction and context Many British Muslim schoolchildren have a dichotomous educational experience; they attend parallel education systems, that is, state-funded mainstream schools during the school day and religious classes at mosques or madrasahs after school (Cherti & Bradley, 2011; Scourfield, Gilliat-Ray, Khan, & Otri, 2013). A dichotomous existence is familiar to immigrant communities, however in the case of Muslims in Western countries, it is compounded by socio-political discourses that pose continuous challenges to identity formation. Islamic education in Western contexts is often viewed with suspicion. Assumptions are made about indoctrination, and media allegations accuse Muslims of educating for ‘extremism’ (S. Ahmed & Matthes, 2016). This situation is compounded by the lack of innovation in Islamic educational practices. In many educational institutions, pedagogy and curricula from Muslim majority countries are still in use in a British context where they may not be appropriate (Abu-Bakar, 2018; Anderson, Tan, & Suleiman, 2011); although there are notable exceptions (Ahmed & Lawson, 2016). For example, in some of my previous research (Ahmed, 2012), participants described their childhood experiences growing up as young Muslims in 1980s Britain. They explained that they lived parallel lives and had double identities, with one lifestyle and identity at home and in madrasah and another at state-funded schools. These participants are school-leaders in two alternative Islamic schools called Shakhsiyah Schools,1 and their own personal experiences have led to a commitment to devise a more holistic approach to their children’s schooling by providing an integrated education within the normal school day. As a founding member of the schools, I was conducting insider research with auto-ethnographic and reflexive elements. For my colleagues and I, this research was in some ways an extension of our own ongoing attempts to navigate the double-consciousness of Muslim experience in Britain. The present research reported in this chapter builds on the wider research described previously to address complex intercultural issues through a pedagogical lens. It reports on a deeper study that examines the use of traditional Islamic halaqah in these schools. Halaqah has been adapted by the schools as a transformative dialogic pedagogy with the aim of developing shakhsiyah Islamiyah (personal character including personal autonomy). Participants in the previous research had claimed that their use of halaqah as dialogic pedagogy enabled British Muslim children to engage in questioning and exploration of their identities.They described how madrasah 647

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teachers who were often trained abroad considered questioning as ‘rude, disobedient or rebellious’; whereas in Shakhsiyah Schools ‘we think it’s a positive thing that children in halaqah are debating and asking and questioning and thinking and pondering’. Their claim is that there needs to be a renewed focus on dialogic practices in Islamic education, particularly in Muslim minority contexts, where young Muslims are constantly engaging with questions about, and challenges to, their faith.

What is halaqah? Can it be dialogic? What existing research is available on dialogic practices in Islamic education? Halaqah is an Islamic oral pedagogy instituted by the Prophet Muhammad, in his tarbiyah (education) of early Muslims, first in Dar-al-Arqam and later in his mosque in Medina. Since then, halaqah are to be found in every Muslim community, in homes, mosques, under trees, in literary and intellectual salons, and within educational institutions. Halaqah are conducted orally with students and teacher sitting in a circle on the floor. An integral part of traditional Islamic education, halaqah continues to be core practice in Muslim cultures, considered both to be a fundamental pedagogical method in ‘academic’ institutions, such as Al-Azhar University, and to be a form of social discourse and transformative education in communities. In both cases, it can be credited with development of learning, of theological sciences, arts, and natural sciences; with character transformation, the empowerment of individuals, and of communities, through a social-justice agenda (Zaimeche, 2002). In many traditional Muslim cultures, there was no clear demarcation between informal and formal learning. The pedagogical format varies immensely and can be transmission-based/teacher-led or dialogic/student-led. It can also be a collaborative group effort involving loose exploratory discussions about Quranic teachings or about social problems in community settings. The ‘curriculum’ or content is open and determined by teacher or students; it varies from Quran, law, grammar, literature, philosophy, logic, and astronomy in academic institutions to family life and raising children, women’s empowerment, history, politics, and spirituality in community settings. In all cases, the paradigm is an Islamic worldview. Mosques will have at least one halaqah operating at any time, and larger mosques may have multiple, for example the Mosque of Amr ibn al-Aas in Cairo is reported to have had 40 halaqah at one time. These circles of learning were often sites of academic dispute and discourse. Although the teachers were in charge of the halaqahs, the students were allowed, in fact encouraged – to challenge and correct the teacher, often in heated exchanges. Disputations, unrestricted, in all fields of knowledge took place on Friday in the study circles held around the mosques, and no holds were barred. (Zaimeche, 2002, p. 3) Halaqah has thus been widely used in Muslim societies across time and place and is a living reality across the Muslim world and in Muslim minority contexts today. In our context, i.e. Shakhsiyah Schools, halaqah has grown from the informal learning of collective homeschooling into a daily lesson, within what is treated by many as a formal Western style primary school. It is argued in Ahmed (2012) that this innovative use of halaqah should be seen as a positive revival of traditional Islamic pedagogy. Interestingly, Mercer has also recognised the importance of considering such non-Western approaches, in his discussion of guidance strategies that can be used by teachers in the social construction of knowledge (Mercer, 1995, pp. 22–23). Dialogic halaqah also bear some similarity to comparative ‘Western’ secular practices such as ‘Philosophy for Children’, which argues that what should be taught in schools is not subject matter but ways of thinking (Lipman, Sharp, & Oscanyan, 2010; Trickey & Topping, 2004). Another similar practice 648

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is ‘Socratic Circles’, which use questioning based on the Socratic method to generate classroom dialogue (Brown, 2016; Copeland, 2005). It is interesting that both these approaches draw on classical Greek philosophy, which underpins the Western secular-liberal tradition. There are also similarities with ‘Dialogic Literary Gatherings’, which use a literary text to generate classroom dialogue (Flecha, 2000). Flecha insists that classic texts, usually drawn from classical literature, are used because they posit fundamental human dilemmas and thus have the capacity to generate higher quality dialogue (Flecha, 2000; Hargreaves & Garcia-Carrion, 2016). Similarly, dialogic halaqah in Shakhsiyah Schools draw on the Quran and other classical Islamic texts to pose challenging questions in order to generate dialogue. Although the practice of halaqah explored in this paper draws on the traditional pedagogy outlined previously, Shakhsiyah Schools have explicitly developed halaqah, both in terms of pedagogy and curriculum, for the 21st-century British context. The aim is to replace ‘Islamic Studies’ lessons with a dialogic space for children to think through and explore complex intercultural issues and develop a strong shakhsiyah Islamiyah. Halaqah is held daily, usually during the first lesson, in classes with a maximum of 15 children; teachers sit with the children in a circle on the floor. In this format, children explore a range of topics through a series of critical questions, which generate dialogic discussion. Teachers will often begin by asking children to contribute their prior knowledge on the topic but will fill in the gaps in knowledge when required for a discussion to take place. They usually prepare some explanation of the topic to lay a foundation for the discussion. They may use a resource, such as an object, a piece of text, or a poem. Shakhsiyah Schools’ ethos is to encourage teachers to adopt their own personal styles in their classrooms; therefore, teachers are currently free to establish their own classroom atmosphere during halaqah. However, teachers are issued with guidance including ground rules adapted from various literature on dialogic pedagogy. Although there are some similar educational projects experimenting with learner-centred or dialogic pedagogies, little research has as yet been done on these relatively new phenomena. Alkouatli has begun some theoretical work exploring Islamic relational pedagogies and pedagogies of mutual engagement (2018) and some empirical work looking at teachers’ perspectives on pedagogical practices in Canadian mosque-schools (Alkouatli & Vadeboncoeur, 2018). This paper aims to set a foundation for this emerging field by comparatively exploring dialogic practice within halaqah in relation to established dialogic educational principles.

Outline of the empirical study The present research aims to evaluate the quality of dialogue and critical thinking in halaqah in order to test the claims of Shakhsiyah Schools’ leaders and teachers that halaqah provides Muslim children and young people with a supportive dialogic space to explore the challenge of being Muslim in a secular, sometimes hostile society. This is done by gathering the perspectives of current and former pupils, using halaqah as the vehicle for collecting data, so that the quality of pupils’ dialogic interactions can also be analysed and evaluated. I collected data by leading a series of three halaqah with a group of young-adult alumni of the schools during the summer of 2013 and three halaqah with a group of children aged 10 to 11 years in September 2014. I have used halaqah as a data collection method before, and methodological justifications and limitations of this unusual approach of using the subject of the study to collect data for the study are provided in Ahmed (2014).The children’s halaqah was conducted as part of their normal lessons, whilst the young people’s halaqah was simply for the purposes of this research. Participants and their parents gave informed consent and BERA ethical guidelines were followed (BERA, 2011). The halaqah consisted of key questions designed to generate dialogue to answer the overarching 649

Farah Ahmed Table 45.1 Research halaqah key questions Research halaqah 1: 1. What do you think of the idea of personal autonomy? 2. Do you think having personal autonomy conflicts with being a Muslim? 3. How do you feel about being a Muslim? 4. Have you ever questioned your beliefs? If so, how did you deal with it? How did other people around you deal with it? Research halaqah 2: 1. Does halaqah differ from other lessons, other schools or other educational experiences you have had? How? 2. Have you had other classes in Islamic studies? Are they different to halaqah? How? 3. Tell me what you enjoy about halaqah and what you don’t enjoy? 4. Do you think halaqah helps you to learn? 5. Is there anything else it helps you with? 6. Is there anything you don’t like about halaqah? Research halaqah 3: 1. Let’s think about halaqah and autonomy. Do you think halaqah helps you develop autonomy? 2. The stated aim of halaqah in Shakhsiyah schools is to develop shakhsiyah Islamiyah. What do you understand by this term? 3. Do you feel halaqah has developed your shakhsiyah Islamiyah? 4. Is there a conflict between shakhsiyah Islamiyah and autonomy? 5. What is it about halaqah that helps you develop autonomy? (To be asked if positive response to previous questions) 6. Do you think that talking together helps develop autonomy? If so, how does that work?

research question for the entire study: can the Islamic dialogic pedagogy of halaqah help develop Muslim children’s shakhsiyah (character/personhood/autonomy)? Halaqah key questions are listed in Table 45.1; a simpler version of these questions was devised for the children’s halaqah. The dialogue generated in these halaqah was audio recorded and subjected to thematic (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and SEDA2 (Hennessy et al., 2016) analyses, leading to extensive and detailed findings. Findings are too extensive to be detailed here in full. They include (i) themes emerging from participants reflections on autonomy, authority, and shakhsiyah Islamiyah; (ii) themes emerging from participants’ reflections on halaqah as a dialogic pedagogy; and (iii) the quality of participants’ dialogue. This chapter reports on a fundamental part of section (ii) of the findings, that is, participants’ reflections on the dialogic and transformative nature of halaqah. Due to limitations of space, participants’ reflections on how halaqah functions as transformative pedagogy and how it compares to other forms of Islamic education will be reported elsewhere in due course. Table 45.2 presents some brief information about participants.

Participants perspectives on halaqah as dialogic and transformative in relation to Alexander’s dialogic principles (2008) The following overarching question is used to frame the section of the findings reported here. In their discussion about halaqah, do children and young people identify any features that can be considered dialogic and/or transformative? This question is answered by considering the themes that emerged from participants’ discussions in relation to dialogic 650

The potential of halaqah Table 45.2 Participants’ details Name

Number of years attending dialogic halaqah

Adam Zakaria Yusuf Asiya Nazia Yusra Sara Sofia

6 7 7 6 7 5 6 (2 months)

Abdullah Qasim Ibrahim Amina Zaynab Kulthum Fatimah

8 8 4 8 7 7 8

Age at time of data collection

Children 10–11 years 10–11 years 10–11 years 10–11 years 10–11 years 10–11 years 10–11 years 10–11 years Young people 17 years 18 years 16 years 19 years 17 years 17 years 15 years

Table 45.3 Principles of dialogic teaching (Alexander, 2008) Teaching and learning is more likely to be dialogic if it is: Collective: Reciprocal: Supportive: Cumulative: Purposeful:

Participants address learning tasks together. Participants listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints. Pupils express their ideas freely, without fear of embarrassment over ʻwrongʼ answers, and they help each other to reach common understandings. Participants build on answers and other oral contributions and chain them into coherent lines of thinking and understanding. Classroom talk, though open and dialogic, is also planned and structured with specific learning goals in view.

principles as given in Table 45.3. An overview of emergent themes from participant’s discussion about halaqah is given in the form of a frequency chart in Table 45.4. For each of these themes, relevant verbatim extracts of dialogue are presented and discussed as follows. These extracts detail participants’ perspectives on and experiences of Shakhsiyah Schools’ halaqah. Participants’ perspectives are discussed in relation to principles as given in Table 45.3, which are used to evaluate the claims about the dialogic nature of halaqah.

Halaqah as Islamic dialogic pedagogy Overall, participants are clear that halaqah is an oral dialogic pedagogy rooted in Islamic practices. The three extracts next are taken from different episodes of the dialogue; they allude to all 651

Farah Ahmed Table 45.4 Thematic analysis frequency chart: halaqah as transformative Islamic dialogic pedagogy for developing shakhsiyah Emergent theme

Children

Youngpeople

Children and young people

Halaqah as Islamic dialogic pedagogy for developing shakhsiyah 1. Halaqah as dialogic pedagogy 1.1 Collective and Reciprocal: a collaborative Islamic oral circle of learning 1.2 Supportive and Purposeful: learner’s voice and teacher’s role 1.3 Purposeful and Cumulative: contextualised thematic learning 1.4 Dialogic: positioning, dialogue and differing perspectives

415

549

964

231 153

245 207

476 360

 85

200

285

 21

 14

 35

118

196

314

five of the dialogic principles, whilst also emphasising the Islamic characteristics and content of halaqah. Asiya:

Halaqah is … when we talk about Islam and relate our theme to it, and sometimes it’s really fun, because we get to say whatever we want. Sofia: … we discuss things in depth, and we link a lot of things to it. It takes one topic, it would take us a long time to understand, because we will go in depth, and the teacher asks us questions. Zaynab: (Halaqah) wasn’t making notes like we used to do in other lessons or writing things down. It was thinking, and trying to learn, rather than trying to study. Collective and reciprocal: A collaborative Islamic oral circle of learning

The children describe halaqah as a form of learning that involves questions that prompt deep dialogue about Islam; it is based on Prophet Muhammad’s method of teaching. Yusuf: Nazia:

But in Halaqah it’s a different way of learning because, you know, most people don’t actually sit down in a circle and take time to think about their religion. When the Prophet used to have halaqah, they used to sit on the floor, so I think it’s better to sit on the floor.

Yusuf feels that a circle is important, you look at other people and you look at their opinions, so you don’t want to keep turning around to look at the people behind you. The children describe sitting on the floor as more respectful. Zakaria links it to the Islamic teaching that human beings are created out of earth and sitting on the floor is because we were made out of earth, like the clay … so you might sit on the floor to think, one day we might go under this ground. The young people also recognise that halaqah has a spiritual dimension and describe the circular format as collaborative, reciprocal, and equal. Abdullah: I think halaqah, it’s more than just speaking, it’s also discussing; … it’s a spiritual style. Zaynab: (Halaqah was) different in the sense that it wasn’t an individual activity, … it was a discussion; it was a collective activity. Qasim: … it had a different vibe, because everyone was doing it together … so you know, they’re equal. 652

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However, neither the children nor young people raise the fact that the teacher joins learners on the floor or that this physical positioning develops a more equal teacher–learner relationship. Nevertheless, they do emphasise the teacher’s role in facilitating learner dialogue and describe a collaborative democratic ethos to the halaqah; they also recognise that learner autonomy is generated through a mutually ‘supportive’, collaborative atmosphere. Their comments seem to describe halaqah functioning in accordance with the first two dialogic principles, that is, ‘collective’ and ‘reciprocal’. Zaynab describes it as a collective activity. Other participants describe the reciprocal relationships that develop over time: you’re quite close to your group. They talk about learning through peer-to-peer dialogue and appear to describe a number of theoretical constructs in the educational dialogue literature. For example, Amina describes the talk in halaqah as having an ‘exploratory’ nature (Mercer & Dawes, 2008), where we get to voice our thoughts more and everyone gets to see different perspectives, because everyone has different ideas and opinions. Fatimah appears to describe interthinking (thinking occurring in dialogue between two people) moving to intrathinking (an internal dialogue) (Mercer, 2000), I think when everybody voiced their different thoughts, that’s when you learn, … when you were asked to re-evaluate your thoughts, and you said something, and you thought hang on that’s not worked, and then you went through a thought process where you formed your ideas about something. I think that’s where you learnt most. Zaynab describes how this process develops and refines the intramental (Mercer, 2000), if other people are talking as well; you start comparing it to your thoughts, so you’re thinking more. The reciprocity described here aligns with the argument that fostering a specific classroom climate or ethos is essential for educational dialogue to be transformative. Supportive and purposeful: Children’s voice and teacher’s role

According to participants, halaqah is ‘supportive’ because it encourages children’s voice; however, they also value the teacher’s role in steering and supporting the dialogue to ensure that it is purposeful. Overall, halaqah dialogue is presented as symbiotic, both child-led and teacherled. The children talk about being given the opportunity to share existing knowledge, all of us get a chance … we gather all opinions; and the opportunity to suggest discussion topics, teacher lets us freely talk about what we want to learn in Halaqah; and occasionally lead the halaqah sessions, teacher says you prepare the Halaqah, so that we get a better understanding of each other. Children recognise that this approach supports the teacher’s understanding of them: we can express our opinions, so that the teacher may understand us a little bit better. This emphasis on understanding each other captures the dialogic ethos of halaqah. It is ‘purposeful’ and transformative because learning in halaqah is not just acquiring understanding of what has been said but also of the person who has said it. According to Zakaria, however, not all the children participate as much as they claim to, he cheekily states that most of the times, it happens that the teachers end up saying everything … because half the time the teachers ask questions, they keep asking questions and all the children are quiet, unlike me. This statement is met with laughter and leads to an important episode of dialogue, where the children challenge Zakaria’s claim and clarify that teachers will continue questioning in order to engage interest and prompt discussion and that it is through generating dialogue that teachers facilitate learning. At this point the children’s dialogue moves from the ‘supportive’ nature of halaqah into describing a number of more dialogic features identified in existing research. For example, the children echo the literature on the importance of teachers’ questioning skills for effective and purposeful classroom dialogue (Howe & Abedin, 2013). I have greatly redacted the extract of dialogue given, removing my questions and shortening children’s utterances to 653

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include all the things they say about the impact of the teacher’s ongoing questioning and its role in generating a ‘supportive’ atmosphere for dialogue. Sara: Sara: Asiya: Sofia:

Teacher asks us the questions like a million times and … And someone has to say it in a simpler form. So, all the children can learn, so teacher can listen to everybody’s idea … When she asks us, one person might get it right, but then she says to people to elaborate on that, and people who are not participating, she would ask them, so everyone gets to join in. Zakaria: … the teacher checks if they’re actually listening Sofia: … we kinda lead on to each other’s answers, to get the right answer. Yusuf: When she says elaborate, she means that, what you might be saying, it may not be that clear … so teacher says elaborate, meaning, break it down into easier words, so that other children can understand. Adam: Also, sometimes when teacher says elaborate, she wants more like in depth Zakaria: … they could also ask questions, because, if someone’s talking and they keep talking, they learn more from other children, so you can learn from other children … Zakaria: Secondly, some people could listen, … and think about it and … (become) inspired by what the teacher’s saying … they might go home, research about it … and have more knowledge. Sara: … you can ask any questions about the topic and express your feelings about the topic. Sofia: … we have a lot still to say, but it’s only for an hour. A number of dialogic features are described here aside from questioning. Sofia,Yusuf, and Adam all use the word ‘elaborate’, demonstrating that teachers actively encourage children to build on each other’s ideas. In a recent study ‘elaboration’ has been found to be a key feature of dialogue that results in learning gains (Vrikki,Wheatley, Howe, Hennessy, & Mercer, 2018).The children’s dialogue also provides evidence of the ‘cumulative’ nature of the halaqah, both within the lesson and beyond, and supports their claims in the Section “Outline of the empirical study”. The young people talk enthusiastically about halaqah as ‘supportive’ and ‘purposeful’; they describe it as a skillful pedagogy for enabling and amplifying learners’ voices. Their comments are more nuanced than the children’s. Fatimah talks about teachers using halaqah purposefully to address classroom issues, some of the most influential halaqah weren’t really during Halaqah times, sometimes something would happen in the class, an incident, and teacher would sit us all down, … and talk to us about what happened, she made us think about what went wrong, … how we could improve, and often it would change the whole atmosphere in the class. Here Fatimah describes how the schools use this dialogic pedagogy to transform classroom relationships. Later Fatimah talks about how halaqah dialogue was inclusive of children’s personal lives, if the discussion led a certain way, then the teacher would just let it flow, and people were bringing examples from their home life, things they had experienced, … we had that scope to play around with … often it would lead to a totally different topic [chuckles and agreement], you’d end up saying how did we get here … we’d sort of just move on however the thought process went … I found that you learnt a lot more. Here, she describes not only the ‘cumulative’ nature of the dialogue but also alludes to the Bakhtinian notion of educational dialogue as facilitating the ‘exchange, acquisition and refinement of meaning … helping children to locate themselves within the unending conversations of culture and history’. 654

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Despite these benefits, Qasim and Kulthum point out that sometimes it can be confusing for children to follow the thread of a meandering discussion, although the teachers do try to steer the discussion back to the topic. For Abdullah a wider discussion can give context to the topic, thereby aiding meaning-making. The young people reflect on different teachers’ styles in halaqah. Ibrahim values learning from the teacher … when the teachers talk, … I just feel like, I’m learning a lot more from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Elsewhere, Ibrahim values teachers’ efforts at encouraging equitable participation, thereby facilitating ‘purposeful’ and transformative learning, in another lesson, someone might not talk in the whole lesson, but (in Halaqah), … the teachers make sure that everyone takes part, everyone learns something, everyone takes something away. The young people describe enjoying halaqah, often at the end of Halaqah, there’d be a collective groan … we didn’t want to stop. Purposeful and cumulative: Contextualised thematic learning

Halaqah is conducted daily and is the core of a thematic curriculum, designed to generate contextualised and connected learning that draws on learners’ personal circumstances and existing knowledge, in order to imbue meaning and purpose into schooling. Without prompting, both groups of participants point to these innovative features of halaqah as it has been developed in Shakhsiyah Schools. Adam: … sometimes in Halaqah we draw mind-maps, the reason is that when we are discussing, … we can go back to that mind-map and get our points from there. According to the children the mind-map is used to collect everyone’s ideas and existing knowledge, which is subsequently used for further learning. Sara says that they are encouraged to find other ideas from other people on the internet, taking the dialogue beyond the classroom to expand learners’ horizons (Wegerif, 2010). These mind-map halaqah then become central to the thematic learning that frames the Schools’ curriculum. Thus, halaqah discussions infuse through the rest of their learning, and the children become adept at making cross-curricular connections. The young people speak in depth about the relationship between existing knowledge and the meanings generated through cumulative dialogue in halaqah.Teachers encourage connections beyond the classroom; personal responses are centralised in order to generate dialogue. Fatimah: Often we were asked to go home and watch the news and come in and talk about a story that had affected us. It was interesting to see which stories affected different people. They also claim that the relationship between halaqah and the thematic curriculum leads to cumulative learning. Fatimah: Sometimes (Halaqah and other lessons) were very similar, because we’d have the same theme running, so if we were doing China, … we’d write in English a passage about China, and in Science we might look at a a … Chinese invention … so often it overlapped; in Halaqah you would sometimes say ‘in English when you did this, I thought this’. Meaning is also created by learning about Islam in a contextualised manner. According to Qasim, it wasn’t only Halaqah, which affects your life. It’s everything all together. Because throughout all your topics … because of the vibe, … about Islam, it was through everything, so Maths, English, Science, Halaqah, everything, … it’s recurring through everything, which helps you. Moreover, halaqah provides the flexibility for classroom dialogue to reflect everyday concerns and contemporary developments. Kulthum: Even if we were studying the same topics in our other lessons, in Halaqah we would compare it to … nowadays, the situation that happened in the past, we would compare it to what’s happening now, we’d just think a lot more, whereas in other lessons it was just, you’ve just been taught it and (now) you can answer the questions. In these extracts, participants demonstrate awareness of connections between learning across subjects and disciplines, within cumulative learning over time, and across varying interpretations of texts and experiences. These features indicate a Bakhtinian understanding of an ongoing ontological dialogue across space and time, through textual and oral discourses. 655

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Moreover, participants clearly identify two of the dialogic principles, that is ‘cumulative’ and ‘purposeful’, as characteristics of halaqah. Positioning, dialogue, and differing perspectives

These principles facilitate high-quality dialogue and it is within dialogue that meaning is generated to transform learners’ understanding. In the following extracts, participants talk in more detail about how dialogue itself generates learning. The children describe the ways in which they benefit from the peer-to-peer dialogue. Yusuf: … so instead of the teacher talking and talking and talking, and saying answer this and answer that, and nobody’s really putting their hand up; the kids ask the questions and then the other kids answer. Asiya: Sometimes we have mini-debates, so we have people who are saying one thing, and another group of people who are saying the other thing and the children get to talk … sometimes it’s planned and sometimes it just happens. According to Zakaria, dialogue achieves three things. Firstly it, it achieves your speaking, how you speak and your vocabulary. Secondly, it teaches you how to learn more, you learn more from other children, … Thirdly, like we said before about choices, while other people are talking, you can make your own choice how um, what you’re gonna decide to say. Here Zakaria is referring to the previous day’s discussion about autonomy and making choices. He expressly links dialogue to the ability to make choices, demonstrating that the children share the perspectives of teachers and school leaders, that halaqah empowers learners and provides a transformative education. Asiya says that in sharing ideas thinking occurs, and Adam says that the longer the dialogue continues, the more depth you can get into, and Yusuf, the more you understand. For Sofia it offers an opportunity to learn how to disagree politely. Zakaria focuses on halaqah being particularly conducive to thinking by comparing how challenging a topic might be in oral dialogue, in comparison to completing a written task; so let’s compare it to Literacy, (in) Literacy you have a topic which is really high and, you have to use more thinking for that than in Halaqah, but if it’s just Halaqah any topic and Literacy any topic, it would be Halaqah because the teacher will ask you questions, and so when you ask yourself questions, you have to keep thinking, because it’s just talking, not really writing stuff, so you would have to think more, because you’re gonna have to talk more. Here, Zakaria seems to be describing a Bakhtinian notion of understanding developing through ongoing dialogue, of the self needing the other to create meaning (Bakhtin, 1981). Zakaria’s comment leads to a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of talking and writing as learning activities. The children begin by arguing that through talking you can draw on ideas from other people, whereas in writing you can’t.Through some probing, and via a detour where they contemplate the benefits of a talking Internet computer, they begin to construct a more nuanced understanding: that it is through sharing ideas within cumulative dialogue that learning happens and thinking skills are developed; that dialogue can also happen across time and space through writing but is more immediately prevalent in talk. The young people are quite clear that oral dialogue generates learning, and this is created through self–other interaction (Wegerif, 2010), which creates the opportunity to weigh up differing points of view. Fatimah states that learning happens through you talking, and seeing what others think of what you say. Zaynab seems to refer to a Bakhtinian notion of polyphony (Bakhtin, 1981) as intensifying learning. Also, if the teacher is just talking, then you’re just paying attention to the teacher rather than thinking. If other people are talking as well, you start comparing it to your thoughts, so you’re thinking more. Whilst Qasim seems to refer to Wegerif ’s (2011) notion of the addressee as necessary for thinking, then you start to reconstruct your own viewpoint (in relation to) everyone else’s. Amina brings the focus onto understanding the other, I think, in Halaqah you get to really fully understand, because you explore different opinions and different areas, and you won’t be reading bias that will just show you one opinion, … I remember we’d have to do debates and play devil’s advocate to 656

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understand the other side of the argument, and that was really helpful. Fatimah describes how conflicting viewpoints in dialogue lead to autonomous thinking. It allows you to be more open-minded because you’re exploring different people’s views, not just one view which is being forced down your throat. For Ibrahim, it allows appreciation of the other. I think, with Halaqah, with other people talking as well, you sort of understand what they’re thinking about as well, so not only you have your own way of thinking, you also understand other people. These extracts seem to describe open dialogue that is not teleologically restricted or dramaturgically orchestrated. Although to some extent there must be some accepted norms, because halaqah is an Islamic setting, participants indicate that these norms can be challenged, because Amina, for example, describes debates, where learners are asked to play devil’s advocate. The direct link participants make between talking/dialogue and thinking/learning demonstrates that they carry some understanding of Vygotskian sociocultural theory and see it in action in the pedagogical functions of halaqah. Moreover, in extracts detailed earlier in this chapter, participants recognise halaqah as Prophetic pedagogy that intends to be spiritually and intellectually transformative and identify oral dialogue as important to learning. In doing so, they echo al-Attas’ neo-Ghazalian theory of learning as meaning generated through language (al-Attas, 1980), meaning that is defined and fulfilled through the relationship between Creator and created. Zakaria, for example, talks about recognising human weakness through sitting on the ground. In this way, halaqah illustrates some ‘non-Western’ dialogic norms, that emanate from within the broad Islamic cultural tradition (Zaimeche, 2002).

Conclusion Due to limitations of space, this chapter has only presented and discussed these children and young people’s experiences of halaqah as a dialogic pedagogy that aims to be transformative. Their ideas about how halaqah generates this transformation in relation to developing their hybrid identities, and sense of selfhood, are touched upon but not related in much depth. Their views on how halaqah differs from other forms of Islamic education are not reported. Nevertheless, by using dialogic principles as a framework to scrutinise their descriptions of halaqah, it can be concluded that halaqah embodies the principles in a meaningful way to provide a culturally coherent dialogic space for transformative Islamic education in the British context. The dialogue generated in halaqah is rich and reflexive; whilst participants freely reference Islamic sources, they also consider their personal contexts and experiences to explore meanings related to their faith and their lives as Muslims in 21st-century Britain. Dialogic halaqah can enable young Muslims to harness and embrace their double-consciousness and use their Islamic worldview to carve out personalised conceptualisations of their faith that have meaning for their lifeworlds. The question of how this approach might transform contemporary Islamic education presents opportunities for further research into the dialogic features of existing Islamic educational theories and practices, as well as how a dialogic understanding of the Muslim-self (Moosa, 2005) might transform Muslim educators’ and learners’ understandings of the purposes and characteristics of Islamic educational practices.

Notes 1 Due to the unique nature of these schools as pioneers of halaqah as dialogic pedagogy, and due to my position as an insider researcher, it is not possible to anonymise them. 2 Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis.

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References Abu-Bakar, M. (Ed.). (2018). Rethinking Madrasah Education in a Globalised World (Hardback) – Routledge. London and New York: Routledge. Retrieved from https://www.routledge.com/ Rethinking-Madrasah-Education-in-a-Globalised-World/Bakar/p/book/9781138739239 Ahmed, F. (2012). Tarbiyah for shakhsiyah (educating for identity): Seeking out culturally coherent pedagogy for Muslim children in Britain. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 42(5), 725–749. Ahmed, F. (2014). Exploring halaqah as research method: A tentative approach to developing Islamic research principles within a critical ‘indigenous’ framework. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(5), 561–583. Ahmed, F., & Lawson, I. (2016). Teaching Islam: Are there pedagogical limits to critical inquiry? In N. Memon & M. Zaman (Eds.), Philosophies of Islamic Education: Historical Perspectives and Emerging Discourses (pp. 236–250). New York: Routledge. Retrieved from //book2look.co.uk/book/Cqt8VsQdvh Ahmed, S., & Matthes, J. (2016). Media representation of Muslims and Islam from 2000 to 2015: A metaanalysis. International Communication Gazette. doi:10.1177/1748048516656305 al-Attas, S. M. N. (1980).The concept of education in Islam: A framework for an islamic philosophy of education. Presented at the First World Conference on Islamic Education, Makkah, Saudi Arabia: Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia. Alkouatli, C. (2018). Pedagogies in becoming Muslim: Contemporary insights from Islamic traditions on teaching, learning, and developing. Religions, 9(11), 367. Alkouatli, C., & Vadeboncoeur, J. A. (2018). Potential reproduction and renewal in a weekend mosque school in Canada: Educators’ perspectives of learning and development. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 19, 29–39. Anderson, P., Tan, C., & Suleiman, Y. (2011). Reforms in IslamIc Education: Report of a Conference Held at the Prince al Waleed bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies University of Cambridge. Cambridge: Centre of Islamic Studies University of Cambridge. Retrieved from http://www.cis.cam.ac.uk/publications/ reforms-in-islamic-education/ Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (M. Holquist, Ed.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. BERA. (2011, September). Ethical guidelines for educational research. British Educational Research Association. Retrieved from http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd =1&ved=0CDEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bera.ac.uk%2Fsystem%2Ffiles%2F3%2FBERAEthical-Guidelines-2011.pdf&ei=CQPCUbLJL8GxPMiWgLgO&usg=AFQjCNEBbCyp9EUSDqS64-oSBVy8O3yfA&sig2=BGHphxKzyWXGewRxYMzOlA&bvm=bv.47883778,d.ZWU Braun,V., & Clarke,V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. Brown, A. C. (2016). Classroom community and discourse: How argumentation emerges during a socratic circle. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 4, 81–97. Cherti, M., & Bradley, L. (2011). Inside Madrassas: Understanding and Engaging with British-Muslim Faith Supplementary Schools. IPPR. Retrieved from https://www.ippr.org/research/publications/ inside-madrassas-understanding-and-engaging-with-british-muslim-faith-supplementary-schools Copeland, M. (2005). Socratic Circles: Fostering Critical and Creative Thinking in Middle and High School. Stenhouse Publishers. Flecha, R. (2000). Sharing Words:Theory and Practice of Dialogic Learning. Rowman & Littlefield. Hargreaves, L.-C., & Garcia-Carrion, R. (2016). Toppling teacher domination of primary classroom talk through dialogic literary gatherings in England. FORUM: For Promoting 3–19 Comprehensive Education, 58(1), 15–25. Hennessy, S., Rojas-Drummond, S., Higham, R., Márquez, A. M., Maine, F., Ríos, R. M., …, & Barrera, M. J. (2016). Developing a coding scheme for analysing classroom dialogue across educational contexts. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 9, 16–44. Howe, C., & Abedin, M. (2013). Classroom dialogue: A systematic review across four decades of research. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43(3), 325–356. Lipman, M., Sharp, A. M., & Oscanyan, F. S. (2010). Philosophy in the Classroom. Temple University Press. Mercer, N. (1995). The Guided Construction of Knowledge: Talk Amongst Teachers and Learners. Multilingual Matters. Mercer, N. (2000). Words and Minds : How We Use Language to Think Together/Neil Mercer. London and New York: Routledge.

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46 EXPLORING THE IMPACT OF INTERACTIVE GROUPS Dialogic interactions involving families and community members Ramon Flecha

Introduction Different forms of dialogic education and their implementation across classrooms and schools have generated instances of transformed teaching and learning and have created high-quality learning environments that benefit all students (Flecha & Soler, 2013). Studies reported in this volume provide sound evidence of specific achievements worldwide and can inform policies and practices to achieve further social impact. This chapter reports research on Interactive Groups which exemplify a transformative approach to using dialogue in the classroom by involving family and community members to foster learning and social cohesion.The impact of this educational action has been widely studied in schools serving disadvantaged communities, such as the Roma (Valls & Kyriakides, 2013), in fostering high-quality early childhood education (Aubert, Molina, Schubert, & Vidu, 2017), in learning mathematics (García-Carrión & Díez-Palomar, 2015), improving the inclusion of immigrant students (Valero, Redondo-Sama, & Elboj, 2017), and preventing early school leaving among vulnerable youth (García-Carrión, Molina-Luque, & Roldán, 2018). These transformations are creating optimal conditions for children to learn and grow in more than 1,000 schools where Interactive Groups are implemented. Since 1995, there have been many schools, even those working under the most challenging circumstances, which illustrate such transformations. One example among many others, is a school located in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Catalonia, which reached a high impact in the media in 2016. One headline the newspapers gave to this case was “The miracle school” (Ibáñez, 2016). Citizenship and society in general see a “miracle” in a school like this when students excel in standardised tests against all the odds, specifically, in this particular case, with 92% of immigrant pupils and 95% of students receiving free school meals, yet they performed twice above the regional average in all subjects. Hence, this case challenged any kind of educational determinism as a result of consolidating these improvements for seven years, despite facing teacher and student mobility of around 30% every academic year. In 2017, the school received the Circle of Economy Foundation Teaching Award for Best Catalan School due to its outstanding results. What educational research tell us about this case is that this is not a “miracle” but rather the implementation of research that has proved to have a social impact (Soler Gallart, 2017). 660

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Thus, the school decided to implement dialogue-based transformative actions grounded on research evidence, such as Interactive Groups, which have resulted in the improvement of educational outcomes for many children and young people in Europe (García-Carrión & Díez-Palomar, 2015;Valero et al., 2017;Valls & Kyriakides, 2013). Such actions were identified by the EU-funded INCLUD-ED project (European Commission, FP6, 2006–2011). Due to the scientific, policy, and social impact it achieved, INCLUD-ED is the only project in the field of Socioeconomic Sciences and Humanities of the Framework Programmes for Research selected by the European Commission among the ten examples of success stories, gathered in the “Added Value of Research, Innovation and Science Portfolio” (European Commission, 2011).The project conducted a rigorous analysis of theories, educational systems, and actions, including 26 longitudinal case studies. Main findings identified a set of what have been defined as Successful Educational Actions (SEAs) (Flecha, 2015), which were not isolated best practices but actions that, when implemented in many diverse contexts, achieved best results in learning outcomes and social cohesion.These actions have shown their impact on improving simultaneously learning outcomes and social relationships in very low SES schools serving highly culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. These SEAs, that is, educational research was behind the “miracle” in the school. The impact of these SEAs can be observed when visiting the school; anyone can see a vibrant and stimulating learning environment everywhere. All the classrooms are organised in Interactive Groups, a small-group classroom setting where students are distributed in heterogeneous groups to perform curricular tasks facilitated by a non-teacher volunteer (Valls & Kyriakides, 2013). When each group has finished the 20-minute task, all groups rotate to the next task, so that when the class finishes, all of them have done multiple tasks, instead of a single one. The volunteer’s role is to promote supportive learning interactions between pupils. The teacher orchestrates the classroom and ensures that high-quality interactions to promote learning and solidarity occur in the groups. Having the volunteers is not a matter of increasing the number of adults per class and reducing the ratios, rather, it is about enriching the dialogues, emotions, and an increasing diversity of “ways with words” (Heath, 1983) that families and communities bring into the learning space. This dialogic learning environment transforms not only the structure of the classroom, or the teacher–volunteer or teacher–student interactions, most importantly it has an impact in the lives of the most vulnerable children like Manuel. Manuel is one among thousands of children living in distress due to immigration and displacement, having studied in many schools which did not meet his academic needs. Here, Manuel finds a school where the human right to access the benefits of educational science is guaranteed. Moreover, having his father volunteering in the class and listening to other children say “the group that I liked most is the one with Manuel’s dad, because I have learned a lot” makes a real difference to Manuel, motivating him to learn and study more so that his father and friends can see how much he is learning.When observing his excitement to go to school and his dream to become a lawyer, it is evident that teachers, families, and students have put into practice what critical educators defined as “Pedagogy of the Shine in the Eyes” (Kincheloe, 2008, p. 90). Framed in this transformative approach, this chapter gives an overview of research conducted on Interactive Groups and family members’ involvement in them, with special focus on the social impact this educational practice has achieved. It first addresses the dialogic shift of societies and the new opportunities that situate language and interactions at the basis of learning and development. Then, it discusses the transformations that involving families entails in classroom interactions. Next, it reviews evidence that shows the impact of Interactive Groups in ­children’s improvement in solidarity and friendship, followed by the impact on children’s learning outcomes. It concludes with some final remarks on children’s educational, personal, and social benefits from participating in Interactive Groups in which family members are involved. 661

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The dialogic shift of societies and science: Implications for teaching and learning The dialogic shift of societies and sciences has taken a greater significance across disciplines and has also had an impact on teaching and learning. The emergence of a dialogic modernity based on a rationality grounded in communication (Habermas, 1984) played a crucial role to enhance understanding and consensus among people as subjects capable of language and action. The dialogic turn questions traditional forms of authority and power in the dialogic modernity, and, without denying the power relationships in the social structure, it creates opportunities for society and social movements to claim and to recover their space through increased dialogue (Habermas, 1984). Similarly, in education, the dialogic turn challenges the longstanding model of banking education (Freire, 1970) in which a sort of monologic discourse prevails and hinders critical thinking and inquiry of knowledge (Wells & Arauz, 2006). This shift can be observed across educational and social projects worldwide in which historically marginalised communities become agents of change to eventually contribute to changing society (Apple, 2013). Classrooms are not kept out of the dialogic processes (García-Carrión & Villardón-Gallego, 2016). Dialogism, which is present in our lives, has become increasingly present in the way in which teaching and learning occur, among other educational or psychosocial interventions (see Grossen & Mirza in Chapter 41 in this volume). However, the involvement in classrooms of non-teacher adults, such as family members, to act as intellectual contributors guiding student learning has been uncommon, and, consequently, it has remained under-researched. Some studies were conducted by Rogoff and colleagues following Vygotsky’s legacy (Rogoff et al., 2001); they explored the advantages of including community members in schools. Similarly, when non-teacher adults get involved in Interactive Groups, learning is culturally contextualised and, in this particular educational action, classroom interactions are guided by the seven principles of dialogic learning (Flecha, 2000). In this context, where dialogic learning is putting into practice, communicative interactions are egalitarian, capitalise on every participant’s cultural intelligence, require critical transformation instead of adaptation to the environment, foster the instrumental dimension of dialogue, are solidarity-based, favour the creation of meaning, and include individual differences from an egalitarian perspective – equality of differences (Flecha, 2000). These create a dialogic space that enables non-teacher adults to engage in transformative interactions with the students to foster academic achievement and social cohesion.

Classroom dialogue and interaction in Interactive Groups In Interactive Groups, non-teacher adults foster students’ interactions for everybody to participate and succeed in the learning task while being supported by the group. Valls and Kyriakides (2013) showed that adults with minority backgrounds, with little formal education – sometimes illiterate persons – and who have experienced important developmental threats throughout their lives can successfully guide dialogic interaction in classroom settings through the use of their funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992). Likewise, these adults introduce in the classroom knowledge from their lifeworld that is barely represented in the official curriculum. Essentially, this capitalisation on cultural intelligence is more likely to happen if the participation of these families is based on egalitarian dialogue with teachers (Elboj & Niemela, 2010; García-Carrión, Molina-Luque, & Roldán, 2018). These interactions with families with minority backgrounds in the classroom can contribute to diminishing the cultural mismatch between mainstream schools and immigrant and minority communities (Valero et al., 2017; Valls & Kyriakides, 2013). 662

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When referring specifically to the Roma community, an outstanding impact was reported in our previous research (Flecha & Soler, 2013). Evidence was gathered from the narratives of the families themselves, the teachers, and the children on the positive impact that involving Roma families in IGs had in terms of the child’s engagement in the learning activity. For instance, in Luisa’s narrative, a Roma mother explained how she entered as a volunteer in a primary classroom, and she made a real difference to one of her son’s friends who always asked her for support with the task. Her presence in the classroom encouraged the child to follow the learning activities that were carried out in the IGs. Most of the teachers confirmed that the ways in which family members scaffold the students provided not only a cognitive support but also an emotional one that ultimately contributed to increasing children’s motivation to engage in the learning. Using their own “ways with words” (Heath, 1983), which are usually far from the classroom discourse, the volunteers scaffold egalitarian dialogue by encouraging students in taking turns, making all the student voices visible, and encouraging everyone to support their views with arguments regardless of their status in the classroom or in the group. Similarly, when a Muslim mother with hijab was a volunteer in IGs in the English classes, children’s pronunciation improved because, having lived in Ireland, she had acquired good English pronunciation, but at the same time, being a Muslim woman wearing a veil participating in the class broke down many cultural stereotypes, and she became a positive role model for all children (Valero et al., 2017). However, productive interactions do not always occur spontaneously when family members or other volunteers join the IGs. Several challenges have been identified in reaching optimal interactions for student learning. First, fostering productive dialogue among students may be challenging for the volunteer. At the beginning, some children tend to solve the problem individually and do not allow time for discussion and reasoning. Another challenge is for the volunteer to counteract students’ use of disputational talk when children are engaged in a collaborative activity (Mercer, 1996). Adults volunteering in IGs address those challenges with the support of the teacher who holds and shares the principles of dialogic learning to guide and scaffold teacher–student, student– student, and volunteer–student interactions.The principles of dialogic learning are important tools for teachers and volunteers to promote dialogic interactions productive for learning and better coexistence in schools.The role that the family member who participates as a volunteer in the IGs plays also ends up having an effect on each child to trust in their inner potential. Each new member of a family participating as a volunteer in the IGs means new opportunities for creating new interactions that are grounded on high expectations for every child in the group. Creating high expectations for the children and for the families’ potential to contribute to the learning process becomes a powerful tool to challenge the deficit thinking that underserved populations usually suffer (Garcia-Yeste, Morlà Folch, & Ionescu, 2018). The way in which the multiple and diverse learning interactions arise from the implementation of the IGs in schools has an interrelated double impact. On the one hand, these dialogic interactions, in which family members participate, have contributed to minority children’s success at school, averting the educational inequality situation they suffered. On the other hand, families become active agents in the school, transforming it from the inside, making it their own, and therefore reducing the existing imbalance between the families with minority background and the school (Flecha & Soler, 2013;Valls & Kyriakides, 2013).

Impact of Interactive Groups on solidarity and friendship The supportive learning environment that is created in the IGs fosters solidarity and supportive relationships in which friendship is also promoted. By engaging in solidarity-based interactions fostered by the volunteers, students are more likely to internalise this behaviour. 663

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The study conducted by Aubert and colleagues in early childhood education (Aubert et al., 2017) provides evidence on these improvements on pre-primary students. According to the teachers, “as they learn to help each other in IGs, they then transfer it to other contexts: in the assemblies, on the playground, when mediating conflicts among mates” (p. 100). A quasi-experimental study conducted in primary classrooms in Spain to examine the impact of Interactive Groups on children’s prosocial behaviour (Villardón-Gallego, García-Carrión,Yáñez-Marquina, & Estévez, 2018) showed experimental groups tended to perform better than control groups after ten sessions of IGs. However, the improvements were not statistically significant. According to Villardón-Gallego and colleagues (2018), the fact that the IG intervention spanned only ten sessions can explain these results, and longer interventions would be required to achieve measurable changes in prosocial behaviour. Furthermore, allocating time and space for the students to reflect on the processes of help and support metacognitively would also help to acknowledge the importance of peer support and supportive interactions in IGs. Implementing IGs for longer periods of time creates a dialogic space in which the teacher does not have to choose between focusing on raising achievement and focusing on values and behaviour; both dimensions can be achieved simultaneously. Evidence collected from the previously mentioned “miracle school” shows that when achieving outstanding results, solidarity, friendship, and democratic values are enhanced. In one of the 4th-grade classrooms, there were two girls who had never talked much to each other. Laura, from Catalonia, is a brilliant student and is always happy to help her classmates, and Ayesha, a girl from Pakistan, had just moved to the neighbourhood a year ago and could barely speak Spanish and Catalan. Ayesha faced the barrier of language and communication, and she did not have friends at school, neither did she participate much in the IGs. In most of the school activities classmates usually left her aside. One day, during IGs in mathematics, the teacher put them in the same group for the first time. They were sitting in front of one another, and the whole group was doing one of the activities except for Ayesha, who did not understand it. The volunteer encouraged Laura to help explain the activity to Ayesha. She went to sit by her side and started explaining it to her little by little until Ayesha understood it and succeeded in completing the task while being supported by Laura. Afterwards, they continued doing all activities together, and when the class was over, they both went together, holding hands, to the playground. In this way, IGs create affordances to foster safe and supportive learning environments even with the most vulnerable children. Students with disabilities receive support, both from the adult volunteers and family members, classmates, teachers, and special education teachers in the framework of the IGs, allowing them to participate in the regular dynamic of the class and interact with their peers, strengthening the solidarity relationships and removing the labels that these children suffer (Flecha, 2015; Valls & Kyriakides, 2013). Research has shown that Interactive Groups have been replicated in special schools, where children with disabilities have benefitted from receiving high-quality learning and safe and supportive relationships simultaneously, promoting their educational and social inclusion (Garcia-Carrion, Molina Roldán, & Roca, 2018).

Impact of Interactive Groups on students’ academic achievement The involvement of the families in the promotion of learning interactions in the IGs has led to an improvement on the children’s learning outcomes, as reflected by both the results of the national standardised tests and the perceptions of the teachers, the families, and the children themselves (Flecha & Soler, 2013; Flecha, 2015; Garcia-Carrion & Diez, 2015; Valls & Kyriakides, 2013; Aubert et al., 2017). The emphasis that is given in the IGs to improving the learning outcomes and promoting the learning interactions has brought up the possibility to 664

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respond to the needs of the vulnerable students living in poverty (Valls & Kyriakides 2013). The Roma community is one of the most affected by lower educational levels: only a very limited number of Roma people complete secondary school; the access to higher education is around 1% in most of the European countries, and Roma children tend to be over-represented in special education and segregated schools (Díez-Palomar, de Sanmamed, García-Carrión, & MolinaRoldán, 2018). In a 90% Roma school in one of the poorest areas in Spain, IGs contributed to breaking the cycle of educational failure: In 2007–08, the eight-year-olds’ classroom showed an improvement from the previous year from 1 to 2.5 (out of 5) 5 in all language skills evaluated: listening, speaking, talking, reading, writing and language use. In the case of nine-year-old pupils, they improved in language from 2 to 3 (out of 5), and the same improvement was obtained in cultural and artistic skills, social and citizenship skills, learning to learn, autonomy, and emotional skills. Additionally, their score in mathematics increased from 1 to 3 (out of 5). (Flecha & Soler, 2013, p. 461) The data obtained from the questionnaires completed by the students about their perception of their learning improvement are consistent with the improvement of the academic results. Indeed, the students who perceived that they had improved “very much” in mathematics increased from 63.89% to 94.59%. The same happened with the perception for reading which improved from 58.33% to 89.04%. These results were obtained as part of the four-year longitudinal case study framed in the INCLUD-ED project, in which we aimed at reporting how family and community members engaged in school to improve students’ learning and social cohesion. A decade later, similar schools serving Roma students under the most challenging circumstances have replicated Interactive Groups across contexts and countries obtaining similar results. The Mediterrani school was known as a disadvantaged school until 2012, when it started to implement IGs, among other Successful Educational Actions. Particularly, the participation of Roma families has been essential to increase expectations of higher education for their children (GarciaYeste, Morlà Folch, & Ionescu, 2018). Results in standardised tests at the end of primary education are consistent with the improvements reported by schools implementing IGs (see Figure 46.1). Empirical data from a study focused on the IGs in the preschool classrooms (three-, four-, and five years old) achieved by conducting interviews with teachers, daily life stories from mothers and children, and classroom observations shed light on the perceptions of the potential of this particular classroom setting to benefit pre-schoolers and promote their cognitive, social, and emotional development (Aubert et al., 2017). For instance, the teachers and mothers emphasise the fact that the children who started IGs in preschool classrooms achieved greater reading levels than those who started IGs in later years. These children who have participated in the IGs from three years old made a successful transition to elementary education. The teachers highlight the fact that in this school, where before implementing IGs school failure and dropout rates were high, children now finish pre-schooler years with similar or even higher reading abilities than their peers in schools of higher socioeconomic contexts (Aubert et al., 2017). A particular focus on Interactive Groups in learning mathematics has been identified in educational research (Díez-Palomar et al., 2018; Díez-Palomar & Olivé, 2015; García-Carrión & Díez-Palomar, 2015). The way in which the dialogic interactions that are carried out in the Interactive Groups in the mathematics classes improve students’ achievement and increase the potential community-based mathematical interventions in primary classrooms is identified. In this case study, the positive attitudes towards mathematics, self-confidence, and self-efficacy are 665

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Figure 46.1 Students’ performance in standardised tests in the Mediterrani school.

evidenced in the children’s interviews.This is also consistent with the achievement data gathered in the standardised assessment test in this school (García-Carrión & Díez-Palomar, 2015).

Limitations and further research Most of the studies discussed in this chapter are longitudinal case studies, allowing us to get a deep understanding of the knowledge that research on IGs has provided. In Table 46.1, detailed information of empirical studies on IGs mentioned in this chapter can be found. Nevertheless, this knowledge could be extended in future research lines with more quasiexperimental research or studies replicated in other contexts and countries in which IGs have just started to be implemented or have not been implemented yet. Only one quasi-experimental study has been conducted so far. Furthermore, even though most projects carried out so far have been focused on the European context, more data should be gathered on the impact of IGs in Latin America, where many countries are already implementing them, and educational policies have been developed to support their extension. Another line of research that needs to be further explored in the future is how schools deal with the sustainability of the volunteers’ participation. Some schools have shown that the sustainability of volunteers’ participation is possible through community engagement. Nevertheless, sustaining a stable number of volunteers is still a challenge for many schools, and it has not been studied in depth yet. This challenge needs to be further explored, not only regarding the actions which promote volunteers’ sustainability but also regarding how to keep carrying out SEAs even when there are not enough volunteers. Particularly, the way in which IGs work in a classroom where there are not enough volunteers for each group (or no volunteers at all) and the mechanisms students use to maintain dialogic interactions without the need of a volunteer to promote them is an interesting issue to study further. The extent to which the teacher and the students embody and put into practice the principles of dialogic learning is as yet unknown. Similarly, there has not been any exploration of how long it takes for a teacher or for a group of students to internalise those principles, in which ways and under which conditions they can be put into work effectively. 666

Table 46.1 Summary of the studies on Interactive Groups Authors - Year

Journal

Type of study and data

Site and participants

Outcomes

Elboj, E., & Niemela, Revista de R. (2010) Psicodidáctica

Two case studies Qualitative data

Elementary schools Teachers, students, family members, volunteers

Flecha & Soler (2013)

Cambridge Journal of Education

Elementary school Roma families and students, teachers

Valls, R., & Kyriakides, L. (2013)

Cambridge Journal of Education

Four-year longitudinal case study Qualitative and quantitative data Three case studies Qualitative and quantitative data

When students interact with adult volunteers they engage in deep and critical dialogues around theirinstrumental learning. All members of the group learn more, and a supportive dynamic develops among the learners. Roma families participated in IG. Students improved learning and engagement. IGs contributed to breaking the cycle of educational failure. IGs address educational inequalities and enhance learning for students participating in them, being one of the most successful inclusive actions implemented in these schools. Meaningful learning situations generated by dialogic talk which may improve children’s mathematics learning.

Díez-Palomar, J., & ZDM Olivé, J. C. (2015)

Two-year longitudinal case study Qualitative data

García-Carrión, R., European Four-year & Díez-Palomar, Educational longitudinal J. (2015) Research Journal case study Observations, interviews Aubert, A., Molina, Learning, Culture S., Schubert, T., & and Social Vidu, A. (2017) Interaction

Four-year longitudinal case study In-depth interviews, life stories, observations

Elementary schools Teachers, students, family members, volunteers

Elementary schools Teachers, students, family members, volunteers Elementary Sustainable improvements school in performance in Teachers, mathematics over time. students, and family members An early-years Promotion of students’ school cognitive, social, and Teachers, mothers emotional development, and students providing children from a minority background high-quality early childhood education and health.

(Continued )

Ramon Flecha Table 46.1 Continued Authors - Year

Journal

Type of study and data

Site and participants

Outcomes

Valero, D., Redondo- International Journal Qualitative study Sama, G., & of Inclusive Life stories and Elboj, C. (2017) Education focus groups

Villardón-Gallego, L., Sustainability García-Carrión, R.,YáñezMarquina, L., Estévez, A. (2018)

Twelve middle IGs increase instrumental and high learning and facilitate schools the bonds of solidarity Families and and mutual help among immigrant students. students QuasiNine elementary Overall, students in the experimental schools experimental groups design 4th-grade scored higher in Prosocial students prosocial behaviour behaviour scale than the control groups. Results were statistically significant for Dialogic Literary Gatherings but not for Interactive Goups.

Conclusions Dialogic education has transformed classrooms and schools to foster high quality education for all to ultimately improve students’ achievement and social development. To achieve greater levels of equity and efficiency in educational systems it is necessary for schools to ensure that all students master the knowledge and competencies to be able to succeed in education and in life in the future society. In this regard, learning through dialogue as it is understood in the context of Interactive Groups fosters a democratic process of teaching and learning that eventually does improve student academic learning and social relationships. As reported in this chapter, the implementation of Interactive Groups in many diverse schools and contexts has proved to achieve transformations that have counteracted the high rates of school failure and social exclusion many children are suffering. These impacts range from improvements at student level regarding academic success or social relationships to improvements at the community level in terms of the inclusion of community members in school activity. These benefits have been particularly important for those most in need, such as the Roma people or immigrants. Overall, research conducted over the last decades on Interactive Groups provides evidence of the social improvements achieved as a result of implementing the results of a particular research project or study (Reale et al., 2017). This is what has been defined as a social impact of the research, which is becoming of interest of citizens worldwide, as identified in social media (Pulido et al., 2018). Research examined in this chapter shows that special emphasis has been put on the social impact achieved by involving family members and other volunteers in dialogic interactions. Based on the dialogic turn in education, Interactive Groups have opened classrooms and schools to family and community members to engage in transformative interactions with students in the classroom. The chapter has showed evidence of how the participation of nonteacher adult volunteers in IGs promotes values such as solidarity and friendship among the students, therefore improving their coexistence both inside and outside the school. Evidence on the academic success resulting from IGs in which family members are involved has also 668

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been discussed. These results show that improvement in values and academic achievements through education are not incompatible; on the contrary, when educational actions are grounded on dialogic interactions, as is the case of Interactive Groups, both dimensions can be enhanced. When the families participate in these dialogic interactions, better conditions for children’s learning are created. In most cases, these family members do not have academic education but apply the knowledge they have developed through their experience, their social context, and their cultural background, introducing in the classrooms a type of knowledge that would otherwise not be present, as it is quite absent in the official curriculum. The value these schools give to their knowledge and cultural heritage, especially to those belonging to marginalised communities as in some of the cases reported in this chapter, creates a more welcoming and comfortable environment for students. This knowledge is fundamental to manage children’s behaviour, to support and motivate them, as well as to promote interactions of mutual help, conjunct reasoning, and exchange of learning strategies with their peers. Moreover, volunteers who participate in Interactive Groups bring into the classroom the possibility to create new and high expectations about the students. Therefore, students’ families become an essential part in the school community. When families who participate in the school have the opportunity to see this themselves, they acknowledge and value their part in it, with a strong sense that they too can contribute to a better education for their children. As the headteacher of the “miracle” school said, it is about: prioritizing the dreams of the community, we can never forget that it is a community project, it is a communitarian project which belongs to the families and the neighbourhood. We really, as educators, are here to facilitate it, to accompany and promote it, but it’s their project, the project is theirs, and that’s actually the most beautiful thing, isn’t it? These transformations are reaching children across contexts and continents. Currently more than 1,000 schools are implementing Interactive Groups and other Successful Educational Actions in several European countries such as Cyprus, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Spain, and United Kingdom. Through other European projects1 schools have established a network of schools that implement SEAs in collaboration with schools, universities, and regional governments to guarantee the best quality education for all children in Europe. These projects are instrumental in a twofold way, first to promote the development, transference, and application of SEAs in European schools in a sustainable way and second to develop educational policies to scale up the benefits of their implementation. Other countries in Latin America such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru are also transforming their classrooms and schools bringing the benefits that the advance of educational science provides to society. Developing research with social impact, researchers in dialogic education are advancing towards the dream of making inclusive, successful, and transformative education available for every single child in the world, where students and their families are the protagonists.

Note 1 SEAS4All. Schools as Learning Communities in Europe: Successful Educational Actions for all. EARSMUS +. Grant number: 2015-1-ES01-KA201-016327. STEP4SEAS. Social transformation through Educational Policies based on Successful Educational Actions. ERASMUS+ Grant number: 11. 580432-EPP-1-2016-1-ES-EPPKA3-IPI-SOC-IN

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References Apple, M. W. (2013). Can Education Change Society? New York, NY: Routledge. Aubert, A., Molina, S., Schubert, T., & Vidu, A. (2017). Learning and inclusivity via Interactive Groups in early childhood education and care in the Hope School, Spain. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction. doi:10.1016/j.lcsi.2017.03.002 Díez-Palomar, J., de Sanmamed, A. F. F., García-Carrión, R., & Molina-Roldán, S. (2018). Pathways to equitable and sustainable education through the inclusion of Roma students in learning mathematics. Sustainability (Switzerland), 10(7). doi:10.3390/su10072191 Díez-Palomar, J., & Olivé, J. C. (2015). Using dialogic talk to teach mathematics: The case of interactive groups. ZDM, 47(7), 1299–1312. Elboj, E., & Niemela, R. (2010). Sub-communities of mutual learners in the classroom:The case of interactive groups. Revista de Psicodidáctica, 15(2), 177–189. European Commission. (2011). Added value of research, innovation and science. MEMO/11/520. Retrieved July 19 from http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-11-520_en.htm Flecha, R. (2000). Sharing Words: Theory and Practice of Dialogic Learning. Critical Perspectives Series. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=ED441176&site=eh ost-live&scope=site Flecha, R. (Eds). (2015). Successful Educational Actions for Inclusion and Social Cohesion in Europe. Springer. Flecha, R., & Soler, M. (2013). Turning difficulties into possibilities: Engaging Roma families and students in school through dialogic learning. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43(4), 451–465. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed 50th Anniversary Edition. Bloomsbury USA Academic. García-Carrión, R., & Díez-Palomar, J. (2015). Learning communities: Pathways for educational success and social transformation through interactive groups in mathematics. European Educational Research Journal, 14(2). doi:10.1177/1474904115571793 García-Carrión, R., Molina-Luque, F., & Roldán, S. M. (2018). How do vulnerable youth complete secondary education? The key role of families and the community. Journal of Youth Studies, 21(5), 701–716. doi:10.1080/13676261.2017.1406660 Garcia-Carrion, R., Molina Roldán, S., & Roca, E. (2018). Interactive learning environments for the educational improvement of students with disabilities in special schools. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1744. García-Carrión, R., & Villardón-Gallego, L. (2016). Dialogue and interaction in early childhood education: A systematic review. Multidisciplinary Journal of Educational Research, 6(1): February. doi:10.17583/ remie.2016.1919 Garcia-Yeste, C., Morlà Folch, T., & Ionescu, V. (2018). Dreams of higher education in the Mediterrani School through Family Education. Frontiers in Education, 3, 79. Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action. Boston: Beacon Press. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways With Words : Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press. Ibáñez, M. J. (2016, 27 November). Milagro escolar en L’Hospitalet (School miracle in L’Hospitalet). El Periódico. Retrieved from http://www.elperiodico.com/es/sociedad/20161122/ colegio-joaquim-ruyra-milagro-escolar-hospitalet-informe-pisa-5640141 Kincheloe, J. L. (2008). Critical Pedagogy Primer. Peter Lang. Mercer, N. (1996). The quality of talk in children’s collaborative activity in the classroom. Learning and Instruction, 6(4), 359–377. Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31(1), 132–141. Pulido, C. M., Redondo-Sama, G., Sordé-Martí, T., & Flecha, R. (2018). Social impact in social media: A new method to evaluate the social impact of research. PLOS ONE, 13(8), e0203117. Reale, E., Avramov, D., Canhial, K., Donovan, C., Flecha, R., Holm, P., … Van Horik, R. (2017). A review of literature on evaluating the scientific, social and political impact of social sciences and humanities research. Research Evaluation. doi:10.1093/reseval/rvx025 Rogoff, B., Goodman Turkanis, C., & Bartlett L. (Eds.)(2001). Learning Together: Children and Adults ina School Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Soler Gallart, M. (2017). Achieving Social Impact. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Valero, D., Redondo-Sama, G., & Elboj, C. (2017). Interactive groups for immigrant students: A factor for success in the path of immigrant students. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 1–16. doi:10.1080 /13603116.2017.1408712

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47 DIALOGIC PEDAGOGY IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD Robin Alexander

Prologue In 2011, scholars converged on the University of Pittsburgh to re-assess the claims of classroom dialogue. The evidence was summarised thus: Students who had experienced … structured dialogic teaching performed better on standardised tests … some students retained their learned knowledge for two or three years … in some cases students … transferred their academic advantage to a different domain. (Resnick, Asterhan & Clarke, 2015, p. 1, authors’ italics) Resnick then nominated prerequisites for taking dialogic teaching to scale: First, we need a larger empirical base for the claim that dialogic teaching is likely to be effective with all kinds of students in various settings and subject matters. Second, we need to find ways of training many more teachers who are willing and able to use academic dialogue as a major component of their teaching. (Resnick, 2015, p. 448) In a subsequent evidence review, Park, Michaels, Affolter, & O’Connor (2017) confirmed that dialogic pedagogy accelerates learning across students, grades and knowledge domains but noting that such talk remains uncommon they warned of a complicating “lack of shared conceptualisations of what [it] is and how best to characterise it”.Yet Howe and Abedin (2013) had earlier found a “shared conceptual core”, albeit with “divergence around the edges”. Such conceptual divergence, pace Howe and Abedin, is marginal only if one views dialogic pedagogy as little more than technique, a view perhaps reinforced by the use of standardised tests as the default measure of effectiveness (see first quotation above). Since other surveys of the field show that dialogic pedagogy can do, be and produce much more than this (Lefstein & Snell, 2014; Kim & Wilkinson, 2019; Park et al., 2017; Matusov, 2018), the extent of a “shared conceptual core” may be open to dispute. In my own work, dialogue is plural and inclusive. “Dialogic teaching” emphasises the teacher’s role in shaping (or inhibiting) classroom talk, and while the framework maps repertoires through 672

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which inclusive and rewarding talk can be advanced, it encourages actors to adapt these to circumstance, emphasising professional agency and meta-level dialogue about dialogue. Crucially, while it makes discussion and dialogue the centre of gravity it does not outlaw recitation or exposition, viewing these as part of the total repertoire, whereas in other models they are firmly excluded. Nor is the approach wholly instrumental, being framed by justifications and principles that pursue both proximal and longer-term epistemic and social goals and conceiving of education itself as a dialogue between different ways of thinking, knowing and making sense. So this version of dialogic teaching, which has been subjected to large-scale randomised control trial in the UK with promising results (Alexander, 2018; Jay et al., 2017), is at once pedagogical process, professional agenda and educational stance (Alexander, 2006, 2017, 2018, 2010a).1 It is on these ideas that I build here, starting with what I see as a widening chasm between the ways of talking and reasoning that are cultivated inside the school, whether dialogic or non-dialogic, and those that students encounter outside it. While the agenda for talk reform at scale extrapolated from the reviews cited earlier pursues the logic of academic enquiry, it makes educational as opposed to technical sense only if it also confronts this collision of discourses. Let me elaborate. For some students the norms of pedagogical, curricular and wider cultural discourse may be more or less in harmony. Others experience well-researched dissonances relating to class, race and gender, and all discover how academic and everyday registers diverge – inevitably so, for opening up new ways of knowing and understanding, and hence of naming, expressing and communicating, is the essence of schooling. But divergence has lately morphed into confrontation. On the one hand we have the sedimented habits and values embodied in school curriculum domains and the more or less rational and courteous ways of accessing, interrogating and verifying the knowledge that such domains embody. On the other hand we witness the raucous free-for-all of social media, the ascendancy of ephemeral and anonymous online content over the verifiable and attributable knowledge of book and laboratory, the mischievous anarchy of fake news, the reduction of judgemental nuance to the binary “like/dislike”, the trolling and abuse that for many have supplanted discussion and debate and the sense not so much that truth claims are open to question, as of course they always should be, as that for many in the public and political spheres truth is no longer a standard to which they feel morally obliged to aspire. As if to prove his immunity from this standard and pronounce the Overton window well and truly shattered, a democratically elected American president can utter over 8,000 “misleading or demonstrably false” statements since his inauguration in 2016, or an average of 11.3 public falsehoods each day, yet still be president (Kessler, Rizzo & Kelly, 2018; Washington Post, 2019). At the time of writing, Trump’s case is egregious, but in the expectation that this book will outlive his presidency I shall not dwell upon it. For its self-parodic character displays tendencies that have afflicted the leadership of many other countries that call themselves democratic, as well as regimes that are openly autocratic: the braggadocio, aggression and narcissism of the wouldbe alpha male; the manipulation of information; the appeals to people’s worst instincts rather than their best; the stoking and exploitation of racism, misogyny and homophobia; the sustained attacks on the press, judiciary and other institutions of civil society that provide the checks and balances that good government requires. And, insidiously but dangerously, the erosion of what Levitsky and Ziblatt call the “soft guardrails” of democracy: mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals; and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives. (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p. 9) 673

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UK legislators have begun to acknowledge the challenge posed by these trends. In 2018, a parliamentary select committee documented extensive evidence that digital media had been exploited to play to voters’ fears and prejudices and influence their voting plans and behaviour in the 2016 US presidential election, the 2016 UK Brexit referendum and elections in France, Germany, Spain, Africa and Latin America. Meanwhile, there was growing concern about the extent to which social media had come to dominate children’s lives, skew their development and exploit their vulnerability (O’Keefe & Pearson, 2011; Savage, 2019). The committee concluded: Urgent action needs to be taken … to build resilience against misinformation and disinformation into our democratic system … Our democracy is at risk. Our education system should [equip] children with the necessary tools to live in our digital world, so that their mental health, emotional well-being and faculty for critical thinking are protected … Digital literacy should be the fourth pillar of education, alongside reading, writing and maths. (House of Commons, 2018, pp. 3, 62–63) Children must certainly acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for coping in a digital world, but I am less sanguine about bolting digital literacy onto a curriculum that in other respects remains untouched. Conspicuously unchallenged is the belief that “reading, writing and maths” are the three immovable “pillars” of school education and that this hoary notion, which shackled Britain’s schools for the urban masses in the 19th century but goes back 1,400 years to St Augustine’s “legere et scribere et numerare”, can be made fit for the 21st century by adding another “literacy” but without challenging the assumption that oracy is merely incidental. Some see the task in terms of what England’s national curriculum calls PSHE (personal, social and health education); others reach for the nostrums of civic education. Traditionally restricted to imparting received wisdom about the institutions of government and the values that are held to underpin them (in Britain officially defined as “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and … respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, and … those without faith” [Ofsted, 2018]), this version of civic education sanitises politics and idealises citizenship. Some might add that it confirms the school as instrument of cultural and economic reproduction (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), if not as full-blown “ideological state apparatus” (Althusser, 1976). In any event, there is little space in the traditional and somewhat Hirschian view of civic education for the awkward question, let alone for the critical pedagogy of a Freire or Giroux (Hirsch, 1988; Freire, 1970; Giroux, 2011). The handling of talk in schools may be no less hegemonic. In Britain, exclusive and expensive private schools used to train the nation’s future leaders in the art of public speaking and adversarial debate so as to send them into the world articulate, confident and ready to take control. This tradition goes back centuries to when classical and then Renaissance rhetoric were fundamental to a gentleman’s education (Simon, 1966; Kennedy, 1999). Meanwhile, mass schooling for the ungentlemanly majority (of either gender) pinned its faith in the 3Rs and avoided unleashing the subversive possibilities of talk. In Britain, the contrast between private education for leadership and state education for followership is still evident in the social and educational profiles of senior politicians, the private/state school opposition of liberal and narrow curricula and – in the UK – the struggle to persuade government to give spoken language in state schools the prominence it deserves and defend it against the ministerial charge of “idle chatter” (Alexander, 2012, 2014, 2015).

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Such conditions highlight the challenge facing those who believe, following Dewey (1997), that a deliberative democracy requires a deliberative pedagogy. For, as Kakutani says, “Without commonly agreed-upon facts … there can be no rational debate … Without truth, democracy is hobbled” (Kakutani, 2018, pp. 172–173). Equally, when immediately after the Second World War George Orwell warned that “The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language” (Orwell, 1968, p. 139) he foreshadowed our own present, for the abuse of public language is symptomatic of what in some countries is a democratic malaise and in others is a crisis. And in considering where all this might lead, we recall Hannah Arendt: The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … and … between true and false … no longer exist. (Arendt, 2004, p. 474) In light of all this, I propose that consideration of the future of dialogic pedagogy should encompass not only the post-Pittsburgh agenda – conceptual clarification, evidence of impact, strategies for professional development – but also four additional imperatives: language, voice, argument and, as a subset of the latter, truth. These provide the focus for the rest of this chapter.

Language Language powers thought, evokes learning, conveys culture, coheres community and – for better or worse – mediates political action. We approach this imperative by way of a pedagogy that links spoken language with democratic engagement. “Accountable talk” was proposed by Resnick during the 1990s (Resnick, Michaels & O’Connor, 2010) and developed with Michaels and O’Connor, who preferred the term “academically productive talk” (Michaels & O’Connor, 2015; Park et al., 2017). It has three interdependent facets. Accountability to community, later modified to accountability to the learning community, establishes and maintains the culture of classroom talk that is essential to collective sense-making and learning – listening, respecting others’ ideas, building on each other’s contributions and so on. Accountability to standards of reasoning “emphasises logical connections and the drawing of reasonable conclusions”. Accountability to knowledge requires that speakers base what they say on “facts, written evidence or other publicly accessible information that all … can access” (Michaels, O’Connor & Resnick, 2008). This triple insistence on accountability – communal, rational, epistemic – speaks to the conduct of public and policy discourse no less than to that of teaching and learning. Michaels, O’Connor and Resnick acknowledge, as this chapter does, the mismatch between what teachers strive for within classrooms and what students may encounter outside them, and “though … we have made some progress in … classrooms … there is much we still do not know about how best to set up the conditions for truly democratic discourse on a wide scale” (Michaels et al., 2008).Yet accountable talk remains a powerful ideal. It links classrooms with democratic practice by being in itself participatory and deliberative, and it has been applied through talk moves in ways that are both practical and successful (Michaels & O’Connor 2012, 2015). Yet its authors speak of unfinished business, and in that spirit I propose a fourth facet: accountability to language and specifically accountability to spoken language. In the first instance, talk must be the object of learning as well as its medium. In the dialogic teaching project led by Frank Hardman and myself (Alexander, 2018), “talking about talk” was

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the first of 11 cycles in a 20-week programme combining professional development with teaching, mentoring and video analysis, and it remained prominent throughout. Similarly, Dawes, Mercer and Wegerif (2004) initiated their Thinking Together with a group of five lessons fronted by “talk about talk”. Out of such foundational activities can come, alongside ground rules for managing talk, a heightened awareness of talk’s possibilities; of the interplay between linguistic and paralinguistic aspects; of the dynamics of turn-taking; of code, register, accent and dialect and their social ramifications; of the relationship between discourse form, function and context; of the language of argumentation; and, salient here, of the nature, uses and impact of rhetoric. Such metalinguistic understanding is sensitised and deepened through audio and video. Teachers in several of our projects have shared and discussed with their students the lesson videos they intended for their own self-study, with striking results. These teachers literally “made talk visible” to their students (QCA, 2004, p. 4). Ever the pioneer, Cazden did this, though with audio, several decades ago (Cazden, 2001). However, video-prompted “talk about talk”, if untutored, may concentrate more on talk’s paralinguistic features than its structure and meaning; or what we see rather than what we hear (Alexander, 2017; Lefstein & Snell, 2014). Carter’s work on the grammar of talk rebalances the focus. Using computer corpora of naturalistic spoken English he shows how written and spoken forms are different not only in obvious respects like formality and fluency but also in their structure, yet sufficient consistencies emerge from corpus analysis of discourse markers, word order, ellipsis, deixis and incremental rather than subordinate clauses for the word “grammar” to be appropriate (Carter, 1997; McCarthy & Carter, 2001). Carter’s grammar of talk is descriptive, not normative. It is an aid to exploring the relationship between conversational structure and meaning, not a manual for “correct” speaking, and in a country like the UK where debates about “correct” or “standard” English are sharply politicised this proviso requires emphasis. A grammar of talk begins to do for talk what literary analysis does for text. But it is only a beginning, and we might also consider whether tools of discourse analysis used for researching the talk of teachers and students might have a place in the education of students themselves and indeed the place in the school curriculum of linguistic analysis of the kind hitherto confined to universities (Crystal, 2018; CLiE, 2019). Talking about talk applies equally in the context of democratic education, for leaving aside the question of whether we live in an Orwellian age of language decay, talk is the medium through which politicians engage with the electorate, even if at one stage removed via tweets and television debates. In the UK I have charted four signature discourses through which policies may be advocated and contrary views marginalised. The discourse of derision (Kenway, 1990; Ball, 1990) ridicules ideas or evidence that are unpalatable or inconvenient in order to avoid engaging with them. The discourse of dichotomy reduces complex issues to a binary choice between caricatured alternatives and the politics of them and us. The discourse of myth peddles inflated claims while belittling what others have achieved in order to lower the baseline against which delivery on policy promises will be judged. And if the discourse of myth is about the destruction of the past, the discourse of meaninglessness destroys language itself, for it evades or obfuscates meaning, parades the old as new, but once unpicked collapses into a tangle of cliché and tautology (Alexander, 2008, 2010b, 2014). The discourses of derision, dichotomy, myth and meaninglessness transparently flout Grice’s maxims governing the relation between logic and conversation: quantity (a contribution should give as much information as is needed and no more), quality (it should be well-founded and true), relation (it should be relevant) and manner (it should be clear and orderly in delivery)

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(Grice, 1975). Of course, such discourses are offset by the judicious language, serious argument, respect for evidence and intelligibility to which politicians of integrity remain committed. Yet this everyday contrast underlines the argument that examining how political language works should be part of students’ democratic education, just as, in their education as a whole, talk should be the object as well as the means of their study. Equally, having recourse to generic tests of the argumentative power and validity of language in use, such as those cited by Grice and (see pp. 679–680) by Walton and Toulmin, or with a specific focus on dialogic pedagogy by Reznitskaya and Wilkinson (2017), or by the proponents of philosophy for children (Lipman, 2003; Fisher, 2008; Gregory, 2007), can make talk a powerful tool for cultural and civic engagement no less than for learning more narrowly defined.

Voice Citizenship is the exercise of voice as well as vote. Citizens use their voices to argue for what they believe is right and against what they believe is wrong.Voice is where democracy starts, and voice is what autocracy seeks to stifle. Like our other keywords, “voice” has several meanings. In life we speak, shout, scream, whisper or sing, and these contrasting physical exercises of our vocal cords express intentions, opinions, ideas, emotions, wants and needs; indeed, who we are. In classrooms Segal and Lefstein (2015) differentiate four senses of “voice”: having the opportunity to speak; expressing one’s own ideas; speaking on one’s own terms; and being heeded. These stages in the progress of the classroom exchange, from permission to speak to acknowledgement of what is spoken, are about ownership and rights. Together, they prompt four questions. What do we do to encourage our students to speak? How do we ensure that what they say is treated equitably and respectfully? When students speak, whose voices do we hear? And how do we handle contributions that digress from our agenda? These questions are partly addressed in the literature on turns and turn-taking, ground rules, communities of discourse and communicative rights and competences (Edwards & Westgate, 1994; Mercer, 2000; Mercer & Littleton, 2007), so I concentrate here on voice in the sense of ownership of what is said. Students in the Segal and Lefstein study enthusiastically contribute to lively classroom discussion and often frame these discussions as dialogical responses that build on each other’s ideas, but at the level of voice the discussion is mostly univocal, since most student contributions are aligned with the official voice of the teacher and the curriculum and in the rare instances where they emerge, independent student voices fall out of the conversation. (Segal & Lefstein, 2015, p. 1) The authors call this “exuberant voiceless participation”, using voice in their sense of ownership of what is uttered (see also Segal, Pollak & Lefstein, 2016; Lefstein, Pollak & Segal, 2018). While they acknowledge Bakhtin’s much quoted maxim that “the word in language is half someone else’s” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 170), they found their observed teachers and students caught between competing epistemologies: on the one hand the principle of co-construction, on the other hand the “official knowledge” of the school curriculum.This dilemma, say Segal and Lefstein, resolves itself as teaching that is dialogic in form but monologic in function. Discussion, however lively and promising, reductively yields what the teacher expects and is, in their second and third senses, “voiceless”.

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I am not convinced that matters are this clear-cut. If Bakhtin is right, then nobody, including the teacher, has an independent voice. Teachers initiate their students into ways of thinking and knowing developed by others, and their task is in large measure cultural transmission and indeed – if we accept Basil Bernstein’s definition of pedagogic discourse (Bernstein, 1990, p. 168) as “a relay for power relations external to [the classroom]” – social control. Viewed thus, even the goal of developing students’ autonomous thinking, notwithstanding the claims of dialogists, is normative. Yet while freedom is never absolute it can be contextually tempered. The path from the official curriculum to the curriculum as enacted in the classroom is rarely linear. Governments may specify, but schools translate what is specified, teachers transpose it and together teachers and students transform or domesticate it (Alexander, 2001, pp. 552–553). It is through pedagogy that a paper curriculum acquires life and meaning, and in this matter the agency of teachers and students is critical. Students learn more outside school than their teachers may credit (Mayall, 2010), and students’ unique out-of-school biographies predispose classroom contributions to the curriculum as translated and transposed that may be as much their own as the teacher’s; though what they bring to the learning encounter enters the dialogue only if the teacher allows it. But when the teacher does allow the student’s voice in Segal and Lefstein’s senses of speaking on one’s own terms and being heeded, there is less obvious contradiction between the dialogic dynamic and a school’s mission to advance the student’s understanding in ways that have been culturally developed and are collectively understood. If teaching may be dialogic in form but not necessarily in function (Boyd & Markarian, 2015), it may also be monologic in form but in its content and cognitive impact more dialogic than to the outward ear it sounds, as when the teacher uses the expository mode conventionally associated with “traditional” teaching to introduce ideas of different kinds and from different sources so as to encourage corresponding dissonance in the minds of the students. This familiar practice reminds us to differentiate inner from outer speech as well as, again, to avoid confusing form with function (cf. the discussion, by Grossen and Mirza Chapter 41 in this volume, of the Bakhtinian distinction between “dialogue-in-presence” and “dialogue-in-absence”). Curriculum domains represent centuries of cumulative co-construction and are inherently dialogic; and while teaching that is behaviourally dialogic may explicate and celebrate the epistemic dialogue and monologic teaching may mask it, neither is inevitable (cf. Mortimer and Scott’s discussion of the tension between authoritative and dialogic interactions in science teaching, Mortimer & Scott, 2003; and Nystrand’s insistence that the bottom line is not the presence or absence of discussion, small group work and so on but the extent to which teaching, however configured, “requires students to think, not just report someone else’s thinking” [Nystrand, 1997, p. 72]). We should avoid treating dialogue and monologue as mutually exclusive. Epistemic and pedagogical dimensions transect; boundaries may be blurred. In respect of voice there is a further concern. Many countries are deeply divided by inequalities of income, opportunity, education, class, race and gender. One of the promises of dialogic teaching is that it more equitably distributes classroom talk between teacher and students collectively and among students themselves and that this redistribution contributes to the larger cause of reducing social inequality. That is why the UK Education Endowment Foundation was keen to support the trial of dialogic teaching with children meeting criteria of social and economic disadvantage (Alexander, 2018).2 Yet while dialogic teaching can be shown to shift the balance of classroom talk towards students collectively, we must ask how far it equalises the voices of different groups of students. If the word is indeed “half someone else’s” does this maxim apply to every student equally, or is it the case that for some students theirs is a “silenced dialogue”? (Delpit, 1988; Edwards, 1989). 678

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In reconciling cultural transmission, equity and the development of each student’s autonomous (or normatively autonomous) thinking, much hangs on the third move in the exchange. Here the work of Michaels and O’Connor (2012, 2015) is seminal, reminding us that the third move ensures that the student’s voice, once invited, does not “fall out of the dialogue” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 168). So, to assess whether an exchange is genuinely dialogic and whether it promotes student equity and autonomy, we might treat the third move as a useful indicator – while being mindful of the danger of inferring cognitive function from oral form (Wells, 1999; Boyd & Markarian, 2015).

Argument In English, “argument” suggests bellicosity as well as rationality, and this is how many students view it (Osborne, 2015, p. 406; Kuhn,Wang & Li, 2011).The norms of deliberative discourse are not instinctive: they need to be made explicit and translated into ground rules (Mercer & Dawes, 2008). Argumentation is an acquired skill, and helping students to move from mere disagreement to evidentiary discussion is a challenging task (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017). It is hardly surprising if students view argument as conflict. They witness the media turning complex issues into battling binaries.They join a twittersphere that thrives on intolerance.They see politicians asserting cases rather than demonstrating them, using evidence selectively and gleefully stoking disagreement into conflict. But the manipulation of evidence is among the oldest tricks in the political game, so rather than deplore this as an aberration students should learn that political and academic argument have different goals and conventions and that when argument is about persuasion and power rather than truth, evidence gives way to rhetoric, and rhetoric has its own rules (Condor, Tileaga & Billig, 2013). Moreover, we cannot treat either academic or political argument as one-dimensional.Walton (2013), for instance, proposes seven types of dialogic argumentation, each with distinctive goals, moves, questions and responses: persuasion, inquiry, discovery, negotiation, information exchange, deliberation and eristic argument.The first six are reasoned and rule-bound, and only eristic argument (from the Greek word for “strife”) aims to win by whatever means are available. Political argument may well entail negotiation, inquiry and deliberation, but the eristic remains its last resort. Prominent in eristic argument are the well-known fallacies of syllogistic reasoning: equivocation or exploiting ambiguity; begging the question; ad verecundiam or citing an “authority” who may be nothing of the sort; ad hominem, attacking the person rather than the argument; ad baculum or threatening dire consequences if one’s views aren’t accepted; and so on. Some of these classic fallacies are numbered among Schopenhauer’s “38 ways to win an argument” (Schopenhauer, 2004), which start from the proposition that logic pursues truth but eristic aims only for victory. Schopenhauer’s list, published in 1831 but still resonant, includes alongside the familiar syllogistic fallacies some decidedly contemporary echoes: “make your opponent angry”, “generalise from the specific”, “claim victory despite defeat”, “persuade the audience, not the opponent”, “interrupt or divert the dispute if you think you are losing”, “puzzle or bewilder your opponent by mere bombast” and “be personal, insulting and rude”. Just as academic and political argument overlap on a continuum, so academic argument is not one mode but many. Scientific, mathematical and historical reasoning, to take three obvious paradigms, are manifestly different. Less frequently explored in the literatures on classroom dialogue and argumentation is argument in the artistic and literary spheres. How do we make or test the case for a work of art, music or literature? Between the 1930s and 1970s the influential Cambridge literary critic F.R. Leavis taught his students to attend above all to text, investigating 679

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and assessing the technical, linguistic and stylistic ingredients of prose, poetry and drama and locating them in historical context, so that they could distinguish the technically original and inventive from the mediocre or routine (and even assign dates to samples of writing without knowing the author, which, like “blind” student grading, certainly aids objectivity). But moving from assessments of artistic technique and style to judgements of artistic merit, or differentiating art from artifice, is more problematic. Here Leavis relied on his famous question “This is so, isn’t it?” which puts a literary work’s moral seriousness and psychological or experiential authenticity on the line alongside its technical and imaginative mastery. But “This is so, isn’t it?” was always followed by “Yes, but … ” – an obligatory riposte that commands both convincing justification and rigorous scepticism about every judgement ventured, the literary equivalent of Popper’s theory of scientific conjectures and refutations, perhaps (Popper, 1963). Of course, this process interrogates evidence of a kind and in a way that would be unlikely to satisfy a physicist, but that is the point: the modes of argument and justification in the arts and sciences are different but not necessarily of unequal validity. As Reznitskaya,Wilkinson and their colleagues have shown (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017; Reznitskaya, Kuo, Glina, & Anderson, 2009), Toulmin offers a kind of reconciliation. Noting that different kinds of question or claim call for different treatment, he proposes a generic “layout” of six elements of argumentation applicable to most circumstances: claim (what has to be established or proved); ground (facts, evidence, data or reasoning in support of the claim); warrant (justification for the grounds cited); backing (additional or alternative support); qualifier (limitations on the claim); and rebuttal (counter-arguments). This applies as well to Leavis’s approach to literary judgement as to the scientific/mathematical examples that Toulmin cites, such as “whether … Fröhlich’s theory of super-conductivity is really satisfactory, when the next eclipse of the moon will take place, or the exact nature of the relation between the squares on the different sides of a right-angled triangle” (Toulmin, 2003, pp. 12–13). Finally, the chapter in this volume by Baker, Andriesson and Schwarz (Chapter 6) reminds us that the complex dynamics of classrooms requires argumentation to encompass the interpersonal and affective as well as the cerebral (Baker, Andriessen & Järvelä, 2013). This is the briefest of canters across a vast and complex field to which others, notably Schwarz and Baker (2017), have devoted the depth and multi-disciplinary breadth that it deserves; while Reznitskaya and Wilkinson have devised an “argumentation rating tool” that identifies four key criteria of quality classroom argumentation and tracks these through 11 “facilitation practices” (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017, pp. 40–46). Learning in general, and learning for democratic engagement in particular, require us to make, understand and test arguments of different kinds. The task is larger than even a reconfigured civic education programme can accomplish: it requires us to think about dialogue and argumentation in every curriculum domain and hence in epistemic as well as pedagogical terms.

Epilogue: truth, narrative and trust “Comment is free, but facts are sacred” was the mantra of C.P. Scott, legendary one-time editor of the then Manchester Guardian. Nowadays the boundary between objective fact and subjective opinion is more blurred than in 1921 and not only in the media and body politic: in academic life, too, it is contested. Indeed, academics may be unwittingly implicated in attacks on received truth by epistemic nihilists in the White House and Westminster. “People have had enough of experts”, declared England’s former Education Secretary Michael Gove of those who cited hard evidence to challenge populist claims about migration and economic benefit promulgated by Brexit advocates in 2016; and “truth isn’t truth” said presidential attorney Rudi Giuliani, to gasps 680

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of outrage even louder than those that greeted Kellyanne Conway when she defended as “alternative fact” President Trump’s exaggeration of the size of the crowd at his 2017 inauguration. But Kakutani (2018) shows how such tropes do not so much come out of the blue as take to extremes the post-modernist rejection of the enlightenment belief in objective reality, provable truth, stable linguistic constructs and reason itself. Habermas (1987) noted that there is an inherent contradiction in using traditional methods of reasoning and arguing to attack those same methods of reasoning and arguing: if the methods are invalid, so is the critique.Yet if there are different ways of knowing and making sense, which there manifestly are – look no further than the school curriculum – and if these embody different tests of truth, then truth itself may also be plural, epistemically if not morally. Some of Jerome Bruner’s most interesting work towards the end of his long life explores these matters, though he was no post-modernist. He groups humankind’s ways of investigating, knowing and understanding into two broad modes: One verifies by appeal to formal verification procedures and empirical truth. The other establishes not truth but truthlikeness or verisimilitude … One mode is centered around the narrow epistemological question of how to know the truth; the other around the broader and more inclusive question of the meaning of experience. (Bruner, 2006, p. 116) Bruner named the first mode logico-scientific or “paradigmatic” and the second “narrative”, which recalls anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s definition of culture as “the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves” (Geertz, 1975). (Not coincidental: the admiration of these giants was mutual (Mattingly, Lutkehaus & Throop, 2008).) But apart from the obvious cases of, say, mathematics and science, assigning school subjects to one or other of Bruner’s modes isn’t straightforward. History, being both evidential and narrative, can be in either mode or both, while locating the social sciences, despite their name, is equally problematic, and in mentioning F.R. Leavis earlier I noted his exemplifying the educated literary response as combining subjective/ intersubjective judgement with evidence from close textual scrutiny. This placed him closer to the toughness of philosophical analysis than to the genially idiosyncratic study of literature as pursued by others of his generation (Tanner, 1975; Joyce, 1988). Bruner’s paradigmatic/narrative distinction might appear to reinforce the habitual opposition of “fact” and “fiction” or of what is supposedly true and what is manifestly made up. But would the many to whom Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale speaks so vividly allow that because it is a work of fiction it does not deal in truth? Would we be happy for this judgement to be passed on those poets, novelists and dramatists whose insights into the human condition take us beyond the reach of the social sciences and who show the complexities and contradictions of inner lives rather than merely attach labels to them? (Leavis again: “This is so, isn’t it … Yes, but …”). In the words of Scottish novelist Ali Smith: Fiction and lies are the opposite of each other … Lies go out of their way to distort, or to turn you away from, the truth. Fiction is [a way] to get to truths that are really difficult to talk about, that we haven’t yet been able to articulate. (Smith, 2018) Not fact versus fiction, then, but fact and fiction versus lies, with both fact and fiction aspiring to truth, albeit to truths of different kinds, while lies knowingly fabricate it. But again there is a problem of definition – fiction as something made up and fiction as literary genre. Ali Smith 681

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speaks of the latter, but the colloquial opposition of fact and fiction does not make this distinction, thereby denying the truths that serious fiction, as opposed to mere entertainment, explore and expose and relegating Bruner’s narrative mode and Geertz’s “stories we tell ourselves about ourselves” to the outer circle of trust. But let us be clear.When commentators complain of “truth decay” and “the death of truth” they speak not of a universal epistemic and moral collapse but of a localised political or media malaise, or in academic circles a post-modernist turn.To most people truth really does matter, and they see it in terms of trust as much as evidence.Today’s truth decay is about the behaviour of the body politic and sections of the print and digital media. It is about people who destroy trust by spreading falsehood and giving comfort to the cynical relativism of “fake news” and “alternative fact”. For the rest of us, including teachers and students, keeping faith with the enlightenment may be the best we can do. Democracy is fragile, and history cautions us against complacency. Playing on voters’ worst instincts and deepest fears, self-styled “strong” leaders fan the flames of division and intolerance, marginalise dissenting voices, debase language and argument and treat truth with contempt. The collision of this discourse with what is aspired towards in schools and universities is reminiscent of the darker decades of the 20th century, Eric Hobsbawm’s “age of extremes” (Hobsbawm, 1995), when H.G.Wells warned that “human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe” (Wells, 1920), and Joseph Stalin retorted: “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed” (Stalin & Wells, 1937).3 The scenario, then, is hardly new, but with a screen in every hand allied to a highly addictive technology, 21st-century mass communication possesses power and penetration far beyond what was conceivable in the 20th.Yet, by the same token, the sheer volume of information now accessible affords countervailing opportunities to challenge and correct, and behind every purveyor of fake news or alternative facts lurks a fact checker. At the end of his vast and prescient 1990s trilogy The Information Age, Manuel Castells concluded that although that enlightenment dream seems forever frustrated by the “extraordinary gap between our technological overdevelopment and our social underdevelopment”, it nevertheless remains within reach, for “there is nothing that cannot be changed by conscious, purposive social action” (Castells, 1998, pp. 359–360). Dialogue is not a panacea, but it is indeed “purposive social action” as well as a vital ingredient of effective teaching and a worthy educational end in itself and hence a manifesto for hope. Dialogue is essential to our response to the current cultural crisis, but only if it attends rigorously to those of its ingredients that are under most sustained attack: voice, argument, truth and language itself.

Notes 1 This chapter is a shortened version of a keynote for the EARLI conference Argumentation and Inquiry as Venues for Civic Education (Jerusalem, October 2018). For the full version see Alexander (2019). 2 Classroom Talk, Social Disadvantage and Educational Attainment: raising standards, closing the gap, directed by Robin Alexander and Frank Hardman, funded 2014–2017 by the UK Education Endowment Foundation. The project entailed the randomised control trial with nearly 5,000 students of a professional development programme based on Robin Alexander’s dialogic teaching framework. After just 20 weeks, students in the intervention group were up to two months ahead of their control group peers in standardised English, mathematics and science tests. The project is discussed in detail in Alexander (2018), while for accounts of, respectively, its internal and external evaluation see Alexander, Hardman, Hardman, Longmore, & Rajab (2017) and Jay et al. (2017). https://cprtrust.org.uk/research/classroom-talk/. Jan Hardman’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 11) discusses the video analysis that formed part of the internal evaluation. 3 Stalin & Wells, 1937.The juxtaposition is not contrived. H.G.Wells interviewed Stalin in 1934, and the encounter produced Stalin’s infamous response quoted above. See New Statesman, 18 April 2014.

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INDEX

abstract reasoning 570–577 accountability-driven 147, 339, 471, 675 accountable talk 144, 154, 174, 675 achievement 144–145, 147, 243, 297, 535–536, 572–573, 664–666 affordance 394, 397–401, 403–406; origins of 397 affordances: for dialogue 389–394, 400–406; technological 397, 470–476 anacrisis 460, 461 argumentation-based 76, 85, 266, 522 Aristotelian 76, 91 Asperger’s 12, 39, 44, 47 assessment 51, 147, 185–186, 243, 260, 301–302, 475, 572–573 asynchronous 394, 638–639 attitudes towards dialogic teaching 269, 272–276, 278–282 autism 12, 44, 47, 567 autodialogue 52 auto-ethnographic 647 Bakhtin, M. 2, 18, 33–36, 52, 54–56, 100, 101, 114, 196, 197, 200, 228, 236, 600, 601; Bakhtin circle 12, 27; polyphonic model 454, 455, 457–461, 464, 466; polyphonic truth 12, 13, 201 blended learning 84, 511, 518 boundary-objects 391, 510, 515, 516 Buber, M. 92, 93, 380, 611–613, 615, 616 circles of learning 4, 22, 648 Classroom Discourse Analyzer (CDA) 123, 170, 173 co-construction 18, 21, 65, 77, 83, 341, 412–413, 417–420, 598, 605, 678 coding scheme 73, 141, 159, 170, 192, 475, 480–481, 598, 613–615

collaborative: argumentation-based learning 76–78, 80–85, 522; creativity 425–428, 430, 431, 433; inquiry 551, 552; knowledge building 487; reading 336, 343; reasoning 322, 324–332; talk 127, 365, 367 creative thinking 336, 426, 429 curricula 84–85, 93, 293–295, 302, 602, 647, 674 curriculum 22, 34, 147, 217, 222, 295, 300–302, 369, 566, 622–623, 648–649, 655, 673–674, 677–678 cyberbullying 493 Danblon 489 democratic discourse 196, 675 dialectical 43, 78, 80–82, 85, 87, 197, 266–268, 554 dialectics 43, 197 dialogic: classroom 122, 123, 126, 129, 227, 290, 300; engagement 89, 90, 92, 94–98, 312, 316, 317, 339–341; literary gatherings 290, 348–350, 352–357, 357–359; pedagogy 5–7, 35–36, 72–75, 139–147, 228–229, 235–238, 375–383, 400–403, 475, 476, 478–482; pedagogy and digital technology 5, 394, 395, 400, 405; space 21–23, 308, 441–442, 446–448, 450–451, 471, 499; teaching 22, 37, 74, 75, 123, 137, 148–150, 164–166, 180, 202, 240–244, 247, 255, 257, 258, 260, 269–273, 275, 276, 278–282, 295, 299, 360–365, 367, 369, 395, 489, 490, 498–500, 527, 528, 559, 651, 672, 678, 682 dialogical 18–22, 60, 78, 80, 82, 83, 85, 100, 101, 106, 112, 183, 195, 220, 221, 225, 248, 252, 262, 308, 317, 318, 341, 346, 367, 371, 372, 384, 385, 409, 421, 459, 464, 468, 480, 489, 509–512, 514, 516, 517, 519–523, 553, 556, 557, 571, 595, 598, 627, 628, 637, 653, 654, 657; approach 39, 42–45, 50–56, 509–512, 597, 600, 605–606; framework 634; self 12, 52, 53, 55, 510; tensions 54, 596, 604

687

Index dialogism 4, 12, 15, 27, 36, 38–42, 44–46, 228, 308, 348, 350, 373, 454, 510, 547, 596, 600, 601, 607, 609, 662 discursive faultiness 89 discursive spaces 441, 442, 444, 446 dissonances 455, 457, 460, 461, 673 dyadic 76, 96, 584, 589 economic 32, 295, 488, 674, 678, 680 educational: intervention 17, 54, 56, 244, 258, 577; makerspace 439–442, 444–451; policy 198, 292, 293, 302, 356; technology 398, 401–403, 405, 416, 419 egalitarian 73, 105, 348, 349, 351, 353, 354, 356, 357, 662, 663 egocentric change 82 e-learning 511, 515, 516, 519 epistemic agency 470, 472, 476, 481 epistemic cognition 214, 255–259, 262, 264 epistemic practices 549, 550, 554–556 epistemological 2–3, 91, 229, 233, 242, 247, 270, 369, 600 ethic of care 622–626, 631 ethic of relating 380–382 ethnographic analysis 63, 66, 72, 73 exploratory talk 31, 79–80, 170, 219–221, 239, 310, 405, 478–479, 481, 551, 571–574 exotopy 54, 55, 59, 61 expert–novice 309, 310 exuberant voiceless participation 204, 241, 375, 677

Ibero-American 100–102, 104, 114, 115 incommensurability 12, 13, 91, 92, 94–98 initiation–response–feedback/evaluation (IRF/E) 126, 135, 141–144, 153–154, 270 intercultural 109, 113, 117, 596, 602, 647, 649 internet age 15, 21, 23, 24, 492 interthinking 122, 293, 378–380, 381–382, 429, 584 Islamic: approach 4; pedagogy 596, 648; relational pedagogies 649 Japanese model 217–220, 227, 230, 233–236 justice: ecological 43; restorative 12, 42, 612–613; social 38, 105, 107, 488 knowledge building 454–455, 463, 469–482, 510–511 knowledge creation 391, 440, 469, 471–472, 478, 484, 500, 634, 638 knowledge-sharing 478 leaders 225, 649, 656, 674, 682 leadership 145, 595, 626, 673, 674 learner-centred 439, 440, 649 learning analytics 168, 170–172, 174, 176, 454, 474, 480, 481 learning to learn 22, 315 learning outcomes 82–83, 140, 144–146, 164, 247–248, 535–537, 661, 664 lesson study 145–146, 217–219, 221, 222, 224, 225 makerspace 440–451 material-dialogic 401–404, 441, 442, 444–451 metacognitive 121, 240, 248, 361, 362, 430, 474 meta-dialogue 472, 478, 480, 481 metalinguistic 127, 360–367, 369–372, 418, 676 metatalk 125–136, 363–369 microblogging 390, 396, 399, 412, 414 micro-creativity 457, 458 micro-dialogue 34, 35 microgenetic 60, 87, 267, 312 multimodal 64, 90, 306, 314–315, 336, 344–345, 399, 428–430, 434–435, 497, 506, 554–555

facilitators 245, 248, 255, 256, 612–616, 618–620 feedback 63, 126, 141–143, 145, 147, 153, 164, 222, 240–241, 298, 301, 429, 480, 636 Freire 3, 4, 22, 100–102, 112, 114, 183, 498 gesture 64, 298, 339, 429, 459–460, 554 goal-directed 564 goal-oriented 516 ground rules for talk 122, 128, 144, 184, 221–222, 299, 412–413, 416–420, 481, 490, 676 group cognition 176, 472 group creativity 433, 457, 458, 467 group discussion 29–31, 144, 183, 246 Habermas 308, 353–354, 379, 662, 681 halaqah 647–658 Halliday 307, 361–364, 366, 554 hegemonic 197, 380, 488, 550, 674 heterogeneity 172, 198, 208, 485, 600 heterogeneous 52, 89, 113, 204, 323, 601, 606, 638, 642, 661 heteroglossia 12, 28, 29, 33, 39, 376, 380, 382, 550, 554, 637 higher-order 143, 154, 257, 345 Humanist: beyond 38–44, 45, 47

narratives 336–340; endorsed 90–91; fictional 314; group 639–642, 663; historical 85, majority 636 national curriculum 578, 674 network 521, 599–601, 605, 606, 669 networked technology 497, 499, 501–506, 528 Nystrand, M. 27, 66, 143, 153, 184, 373–374 ontological 3, 39, 91, 308, 442, 528, 600, 605, 626, 637–638 oracy 6, 15, 239, 242, 289, 292–302, 306, 313–315, 360, 596, 674 oracy skills 295–302, 596 oracy toolkit 301 orthoglossia 29, 30

688

Index Paideia seminar 321, 322, 326, 332 peer-group 314, 427 peer-led 323, 324, 332 philosophy for children 22, 144, 256, 300, 322, 328, 330–332, 648 posthumanism 38–44, 46, 47 posthumanist 42, 48, 453 post-positivist 39 post-truth 596, 672 preservice 269–275, 279, 281, 282 professional development 145–151, 155, 162, 164–166, 168, 170, 213–216, 218, 238, 241, 255, 257–259, 261–264, 269, 271, 281, 676, 682 provisionality 339, 400, 403, 405, 429, 474 reflective dialogue 145, 435, 474 reflective thinking 139, 262 scaffolding 83–85, 240, 244, 256, 258, 270, 273, 311, 312, 316, 349, 354 Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (SEDA) 248, 285, 309–314, 627–632, 657 sociocultural 101–102, 141–142, 307–308, 311, 600–602 social-emotional 140, 152, 357 social interaction 2, 54, 65, 66, 108, 109, 141, 142, 313, 314, 318, 348, 366, 419, 483, 562, 570, 574, 575, 584, 596, 612, 635 social networks 96, 104, 485, 492, 493 Socratic Circles 649 STEAM 440, 442, 444, 451 student-led 330, 479, 533, 648 student-student 122, 126, 133, 139, 152, 170, 534, 581, 583–585, 589, 590, 628, 663 student talk 152–154, 156, 158, 159, 162, 374–378, 381, 382, 585, 588, 590 synchronous 638–639 syncrisis 460, 461

teacher-led recitation 36, 142, 153, 162 technology-enhanced 425, 430, 431 technology-mediated 395, 400, 402, 481, 482 temporal 52, 158, 173, 345, 400 thinking together 239, 294, 299, 310, 312, 402, 417–419, 431, 433, 573–577, 676 transformations 38, 82, 147, 348, 352, 355, 357, 601, 660, 661, 668, 669 transformative 113, 114, 352, 396, 477, 480, 485, 489, 510, 593, 595, 596, 647, 648, 650, 652, 653, 655–657, 660–662, 668, 669 trialogic 513–515, 521 trialogical approach 510, 516, 522 trialogical framework 509 trialogical objects 510, 512, 520 T-SEDA 248, 285; see also Scheme for Educational Dialogue Analysis (SEDA) unconditional positive regard 611, 612 ventriloquism phenomenon 458, 459 verbalisation 363, 364, 367 vicarious participation 19 video-based peer review 145, 155 video-based teacher pd 168, 173 visual learning 167, 168, 170–177 Vygotsky 18–19, 21, 101, 141, 196–199, 395, 441, 548, 570, 583, 601, 625; neo-Vygotskian 197, 199 Wells, G. 27, 143, 229, 239, 242, 320, 548–549 western positivist 39 Yakubinsky 30, 31 yeshiva 76 zone of proximal development (ZPD) 4, 18–21, 197, 511–516, 519–520

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