The Complexity of Becoming a Dialogic Teacher in a Language Arts Classroom (original) (raw)
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Better than best practice : developing teaching and learning through dialogic pedagogy
2014
List of tables and figures Acknowledgments Transcription conventions Section A - Where We're Coming From 1. Better than Best Practice 2. Towards Dialogic Pedagogy 3. Setting the Scene: Working Towards Dialogue in a London Primary School Section B - Classroom Episodes Introduction: Practical Suggestions for Engaging with the Episodes 4. Breakthrough to Dialogue? Episode 1. Getting in to Narnia Commentaries David Reedy, Thinking collectively, backed by evidence James Cresswell, Art of Education: Balancing Direction and Dialogue 5. Responding to a Pupil Challenge Episode 2: 'I don't really like that, Miss' Commentaries Robin Alexander, Triumphs and dilemmas of dialogue Gemma Moss, Writing in the talk Greg Thompson, A Challenge (?) in the Interest of Dialogue Laura Hughes, The impact of dialogic teaching techniques - a teacher's perspective 6. Importing Popular Culture into the Classroom Episode 3: 'So we're going to have X Factor' Commentaries Roxy Harri...
Research in the Teaching of English, 2015
While there is consensus that dialogic teaching should involve a repertoire of teaching and learning talk patterns and approaches, authorities who enjoin teachers to engage in dialogic teaching generally characterize classroom dialogue in terms of surface features such as open questions. But dialogic teaching is not defined by discourse structure so much as by discourse function. When teachers adopt a dialogic instructional stance, they treat dialogue as a functional construct rather than structural, and classroom oracy can thrive. Our research finds that dialogic talk functions to model and support cognitive activity and inquiry and supportive classroom relations, to engage multiple voices and perspectives across time, and to animate student ideas and contributions. Employing narrative analysis and cross-episodic contingency analysis, we tell a story in three episodes about how oracy practices promote dialogic functions in a third-grade classroom. We unpack how a particular teaching exchange—one we have selected specifically for its nondialogic surface appearance—reflects dialogic teaching. Findings show how supportive epistemic and communal functions of classroom talk are more important to successful dialogic teaching and learning than are surface dialogic features. We argue it is necessary to look beyond interactional form and unpack function, uptake, and purpose in classroom discourse. There is no single set of teaching behaviors that is associated with dialogism. Rather, teachers can achieve dialogic discourse in their classrooms through attention to underlying instructional stance.
Journey into dialogic pedagogy
2009
The author came to the decision to embark on this journey into dialogic pedagogy when he firmly realized that education is essentially dialogic. It is not that pedagogy should be dialogic – he rather argues that it is always dialogic. This is true whether the participants in it, or outside observers of it, realize it or not -- and even when the participants are resistant to dialogue. This statement is in contrast with views that promote dialogic interaction in the classroom as a form of instruction. This conceptualization contrasts with views that dialogic interaction or conversational instruction are more effective instructional means in comparison to, let’s say, a more monologic genre of instruction such as a lecture or a demonstration. This statement is also in contrast with views that assume dialogue is a pedagogical instrument that can be turned on and off. He argues that whatever teachers and students do (or not do) whether in their classrooms or beyond it, they are locked in dialogic relations.
Implications of Dialogic Teaching: Practices of and Reflections from English Language Teachers
2021
Researches often endorse discussion, dialogues, and other learning tasks for the promotion of fluency, critical thinking, reasoning, and ability to evaluate and justifying. Keeping in view the Pakistani context, especially, the local context, it is not clear what type of classroom practices prevail in the region and what reflections teachers have about the use of such practices. Taking Bakhtin's and Vygotsky's ideas of dialogism and learning as a social entity, the present study aimed at knowing the teaching practices of English language teachers from the perspective of dialogic teaching and also at exploring how do teachers reflect on such a teaching approach. For this purpose, English Language Centers of district Mardan were taken as data sources where twenty classrooms were observed for classroom practices and the concerned teachers were interviewed for their reflections. It was found that the teachers use of dialogic teaching having positive and negative impacts. The pos...
The value and practice of dialogic teaching
慶應義塾大学日吉紀要. 英語英米文学, 2020
This paper presents a grounded analysis of student attitudes toward the dialogic instructional style used in an advanced, first-year university EFL classroom. During the two semesters of a year-long class that met weekly, I conducted 22 anonymous surveys of student opinion, which I analyzed qualitatively. Three general themes emerged. First, students shifted their view of the L2, adopting a more active and engaged stance toward language study. Second, students expressed positive endorsement for the teacher's interactional style, albeit with some reservations about overlap and interruption. Third, students seemed to appropriate a new sense of identity vis-à-vis English, with increased confidence and commitment. Findings suggest that the dialogic approach was grounded in a social orientation to the L2 in the third space of the FL classroom.
Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 2020
A review of Skidmore, D & K. Murakami (Eds). (2016). Dialogic Pedagogy: The importance of dialogue in teaching and learning. Bristol, United Kingdom: Multilingual Matters. Skidmore and Murakami's collection of essays takes on a dual theoretical and empirical project: first, to define and advocate for dialogical classroom pedagogy; and second, to unearth such practice through microstudies of classroom dialogue. This project divides itself neatly in half: the first six chapters trace the theory of dialogic pedagogy, including the history of discourse, coding, and practices, while the remaining seven are devoted to empirical studies marked by a careful microanalysis of dialogue. The work distinguishes itself from scholarship on the dialogical the past 20 years, during which works have either been single-authored, deeply-researched, and theoretical (Matusov. While special journal editions have brought new focus to unexplored threads of the dialogical, such as the exploration of silence in the classroom or the history of the School of the Dialogue of Cultures (Matusov 2009b), this collection affords considerable latitude to its theoretical and historical frame. A comparable work of conceptual breadth is that of White (2016), whose publication frames classroom research of lower school learners with concepts from Bakhtin. Like White's work, Skidmore and Murakami paint at once in broad strokes and miniature: on the one hand, the collection situates dialogical pedagogy into its historical context, interweaving the work of early Russian theorists; at the same time, it offers granular studies of classroom dialogue. Since Skidmore authors or co-authors seven of the 13 chapters, the collection somewhat serves as a project of singular intent, one that raises a persistent question as to whether the methodologies in the studies presented in the second half of the work, focused on Conversational Analysis (CA) and the Discourse Analysis (DA), cohere to the ambitions of dialogical pedagogy offered in the first. In the end, the promise that CA affords greater magnification of classroom moments does not overcome what may be a limitation of the methodology to unearth dialogic pedagogy.
In this paper I argue that dialogic teaching and learning is and involves a stance and comportment toward experience and information that is marked by joint purposes and intertextual ties that are manifest in classroom talk across time and across time scales. I assert that classroom talk practices must be examined in terms of patterned use and uptake; as part of a repertoire of past, present and anticipated discourse practices; and through ways they contribute to an overall classroom community teaching and learning trajectory. For this study I conducted a sociocultural discourse analysis on a daily five-minute activity Song of the Week in an urban second grade classroom community. I investigated ways this activity shed light on a classroom community dialogic trajectory of teaching and learning. I contextualized this activity in terms of selections of Songs of the Week across the year, and as a recurring activity of Morning Meeting. I purposefully selected and then examined the classroom talk around one song, "Man in the Mirror" by Michael Jackson, and explicated planned and in-the-moment intertextual ties that connected content and procedures across events and experiences, and across time. My findings showed how embedded connections within and across talk practices, and predictable but flexible procedures and routines, sustained shared dialogic purposes across interactions. This study is important because it showcases this classroom community's dialogic teaching and learning trajectory to situate and unfold an understanding of dialogic teaching and learning as a "big picture" and idiosyncratic process.
Engaged Dialogic Pedagogy and the Tensions Teachers Face
The Dialogic Pedagogy Journal, 2019
Book review: Fecho, B., Falter, M., & Hong, X. (2016). Teaching outside the box and inside the standards: Making room for dialogue. New York: Teachers College Press. This review highlights the editors' vision of showing the power of engaged dialogic practice in classroom contexts that are at odds with the push for the standardization of schools and learning. In particular, this review will show how the individual stories of the four teachers highlighted in the book along with the experience of the university researchers created a dialogue from which readers can take hope that their choice to engage in Bakhtinian dialogism in the context of their classrooms is a worthy pursuit. According to the book, this is true even when that choice puts them at odds with other teachers, administrators, and state or national standards. This review will show that the editors and the teachers whose stories are told do not intend for their readers to come to this text ready to join the fight against standards, but for them to be able to see how dialogue is exceptionally important in working in standardized spaces. The book itself is short with only six chapters and just over one hundred pages, therefore, the review will address each chapter individually and its overall engagement with the purpose outlined above. Each chapter ends with the author's suggestions for action which can help the reader new to dialogical pedagogy grasp dialogical strategies.
Dialogic Pedagogy an International Online Journal, 2014
In September 2011 in Rome at the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research conference, Eugene Matusov (USA), Kiyotaka Miyazaki (Japan), Jayne White (New Zealand), and Olga Dysthe (Norway) organized a symposium on Dialogic Pedagogy. Formally during the symposium and informally after the symposium several heated discussions started among the participants about the nature of dialogic pedagogy. The uniting theme of these discussions was a strong commitment by all four participants to apply the dialogic framework developed by Soviet-Russian philosopher and literary theoretician Bakhtin to education. In this special issue, Eugene Matusov (USA) and Kiyotaka Miyazaki (Japan) have developed only three of the heated issues discussed at the symposium in a form of dialogic exchanges (dialogue-disagreements). We invited our Dialogic Pedagogy colleagues Jayne White (New Zealand) and Olga Dysthe (Norway) to write commentaries on the dialogues. Fortunately, Jayne White kindly accepted the request and wrote her commentary. Unfortunately, Olga Dysthe could not participate due to her prior commitments to other projects. We also invited Ana Marjanovic-Shane (USA), Beth Ferholt (USA), Rupert Wegerif (UK), and Paul Sullivan (UK) to comment on Eugene-Kiyotaka dialogue-disagreement. The first two heated issues were initiated by Eugene Matusov by providing a typology of different conceptual approaches to Dialogic Pedagogy that he had noticed in education. Specifically, the debate with Kiyotaka Miyazaki (and the other two participants) was around three types of Dialogic Pedagogy defined by Eugene Matusov: instrumental, epistemological, and ontological types of Dialogic Pedagogy. Specifically, Eugene Matusov subscribes to ontological dialogic pedagogy arguing that dialogic pedagogy should be built around students' important existing or emergent life interests, concerns, questions, and needs. He challenged both instrumental dialogic pedagogy that is mostly interested in using dialogic interactional format of instruction to make students effectively arrive at preset curricular endpoints and epistemological dialogic pedagogy that is most interested in production of new knowledge for students. Kiyotaka Miyazaki (and other participants) found this typology not to be useful and challenged the values behind it. Kiyotaka Miyazaki introduced the third heated topic of treating students as "heroes" of the teacher's polyphonic pedagogy similar to Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel based on Bakhtin's analysis. Eugene Matusov took issue with treating students as "heroes" of teacher's polyphonic pedagogy arguing that in Dialogic Pedagogy students author their own education and their own becoming. Originally, we wanted to present our Dialogue on Dialogic Pedagogy in the following format. An initiator of a heated topic develops his argument, the opponent provides a counter-argument, and then the initiator has an opportunity to reply with his "final word" (of course, we know that there is no "final word" in a dialogue). However, after