159 research outputs found
Sort by
Leadership learning design principles: Co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts
Full text linkThe purpose of this paper is to share our pedagogical evolution as graduate faculty in relationship with increasingly diverse cohort communities of early childhood professionals learning across the landscape of leadership roles engaged with young children, families, and other adults. The early childhood leadership program described in this paper offers a graduate certificate where annually, a cohort of 18-22 early childhood professionals from across Colorado in the United States learn together for 13 months. As faculty, we share a strong commitment to both learning about our teaching and to inviting student voices, the early childhood professionals, through dialogic processes in participatory study as we co-learn and grow our practices of learning and teaching. This paper introduces and explores four leadership learning design principles: (1) identity and agency, (2) socially constructed pedagogy, (3) contextually relevant learning experience, and (4) appreciative stance. As we go, the story will unfold around how we engaged cohort members of the 2019-2020 program year through initial survey reflections and then deepening our shared understanding of these leadership learning design principles through iterations of dialogue after the program was concluded. We end the paper with reflections on how this process of study has ultimately brought us to an awareness and eagerness to engage in relational forms of inquiry, placing student voices at the center with even more intention and depth
Dialogues in education: Exploring cases from music and mathematics education
Full text linkThe aim of this study is to explore how aspects of dialogic teaching are concretized in classrooms to fill the gap between educational rhetoric and classroom practices. A central competency needed in our time is the ability to participate in democratic dialogue. Education for democratic citizenship can be connected to the notion of “becoming human,” which is a central idea in the Bildung dimension of education. The national educational regulations in Norway state that the teacher’s mandate is not limited to conveying knowledge and skills but also includes fostering the students’ critical reflection, inquisitiveness, and participation. The research questions that guided the study are: What theoretical concepts can be helpful in understanding and analyzing dialogic classroom practices? How can participation be promoted through dialogic classroom practice? How do the dimensions of ontological and epistemological dialogue appear in educational settings, and how do they interact with each other? Methodologically, the article presents, analyzes, and discusses two cases from different educational settings: pre-service teacher education music courses and upper-primary-level mathematics education. The findings show that the chosen theoretical concepts of mathematizing, musicking, and Bildung, as well as ontological and epistemological dialogue, are helpful in making sense of dialogic classroom practices
Democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in Martin Duberman’s innovative pedagogy
Full text linkMy essay aims to develop my authorial map-account of Martin Duberman’s various educational paradigms manifest in his experimental seminars at Princeton University, Hunter College, and Lehman College CUNY, 1966-1971 (and beyond) that I abstracted from his claims about his innovative educational teaching. I tried to develop a terrain of educational philosophical paradigms that shaped his goals, judgments, definitions of success, frustrations, and so on, and engage in a dialogic analysis of this terrain. His innovative pedagogy was driven by diverse and often conflicting educational philosophies involving democracy, dialogism, and therapy, among other values. I discuss the synergies and conflicts of these values in Duberman’s pedagogy
Advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas
Full text linkThe present paper inquires whether a meticulous program designed to resolve Interdisciplinary Societal Dilemmas through dialogic argumentation advances epistemic practices. To delineate how epistemic practices are manifested in classroom discussions, we adopted the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which explores the interactions and agencies of human and non-human actors. ANT analyses uncover the power these actors exert on each other and help recognize the networks that these actors create or dissolve. They also delineate how epistemic practices emerge and are shaped in these networks. We identified four epistemic practices in the discussions: (1) taking a reasoned position, (2) integrating knowledge from different disciplines, (3) weighing pros and cons before taking a complex position, and (4) role-playing in a democratic game. We show that the type of discourse developed in the program was mostly dialogic argumentation. In addition, we demonstrate how teachers often inhibit these advancements. Indeed, in the case of integrating knowledge from different disciplines, teachers’ role is central, but the emerged actors’ network is often non-dialogic. Moreover, we show how non-human actors shape the interactions in networks as well as the formation of knowledge and agency. We conclude that: (a) the design of activities for resolving interdisciplinary societal dilemmas provides many opportunities for advancing epistemic practices, (b) these practices are mostly advanced through dialogic argumentation, but (c) more efforts should be invested in affording interdisciplinary argumentation
Overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process
Full text linkIn this article, I present a way of understanding how to overcome violence through dialogue and the democratic organization of group relations. The goal is to discuss how this approach to overcoming violence in an NGO (non-governmental organization) revealed the need to be flexible, to listen to each other, and to be willing to create a new unknown path together with the students by developing the activities to overcome violence (AOV). The objective of the AOV was to change the interpersonal relationships in the organization, to make it a place of co-existence for the children and adults, and to overcome this preponderant form of relational violence. I present actual events that took place at a Brazilian NGO specifically founded to provide care for children at social risk. The project I designed at the NGO focused on the (re-)organization of teaching activities and daily life as a community practice creating a community as a space where the relationships among the participants could become more democratic. The idea was to transform the power and individualistic domination of the NGO’s teachers, coordinators, or founders into shared power relationships established through democratic and dialogical processes.
The expected result was that the young attendees of the NGO would become community authors of their own life in the institution and have more personal autonomy. this process also showed us that while we could transform reality, the reality was also transforming our expectations. The very dynamics of the dialogical process require openness in the sense that one cannot predefine the goals according to one’s wishes. One has to be ready to accept the new, unexpected issues that may arise through dialogues and change initial objectives. In any case, I would reckon that one cannot strictly control the dialogical process. For this reason, the means and instruments, as well as the procedures for the AOV have to be understood, created, and reinvented during the process by the participants themselves and not by a single person prior to the AOV. The results showed that an action plan and instruments could only be suggested as a guide during the events, but not as an a priori condition, independent of all those involved in the actions taken
The educational regime of the Bakhtinian dialogue
Full text linkMany dialogue-oriented educationalists are attracted to the Bakhtinian notion of dialogue. In this theoretical essay, I have abstracted five major features of the Bakhtinian dialogue and considered what kind of educational regime emerges from these features. In conclusion, I problematize the notion of Bakhtinian dialogue and its regime for education. The paper was presented and discussed at the 17th Bakhtinian conference in Saransk, Russia, in 2021
Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences: A pragmatic approach to classroom dialogue and argumentation
Full text linkGoal. The problem of the authenticity of teacher questions has not received sufficient attention from educational researchers interested in the intersection between dialogue and argumentation. In this paper, we adopt a definition of authentic questions as dialogical units that prompt teacher-student interactions that are both productive (i.e., several students participating) and constructive (i.e., students produce arguments of high complexity). Our goal is to analyze whether and how specific types of dialogue prompts can encourage students’ engagement in more sophisticated argumentative interactions, as manifested through the construction of high-complexity arguments.
Method. We describe the implementation of our analytical approach to a large corpus of classroom interactions from five European countries. The corpus was segmented into dialogical sequences, which were then coded according to the argumentation dialogue goal expressed in the sequence. We also coded students’ arguments according to Toulmin’s elements and distinguished between low- and high-complexity arguments from a structural point of view.
Findings. Our findings show the predominance of the so-called Discovery questions as prompts that are both productive and constructive and Inquiry questions as prompts of argumentative constructive interactions. We discuss the importance of these findings for teacher professional development purposes
Dialogic teacher inquiry: The case of a preservice teacher learning to facilitate class discussion
Full text linkDeveloping knowledge and practice for high-quality K-12 class discussion remains challenging, especially for new teachers juggling other classroom responsibilities. Our study reports the case of a preservice teacher learning to lead discussions while enrolled in a teacher education inquiry course, simultaneous with semester-long supervised practice teaching in a seventh-grade class (12-13-year-olds) in a high-poverty urban community. The work is guided by a complex teacher learning process for developing complex practice of facilitating discussions in culturally and linguistically diverse high school English classes. Countering popular approaches to “talk moves” as useful but often generic facilitation practices, the teacher education pedagogical innovation we describe positions teachers as knowledge-generating, agentive professionals. Our conceptual framework for teacher learning features dialogic teacher inquiry, with three domains. The first domain involves moving beyond methods texts to dialoguing analytically with and among multiple print, online, and mentor resources for supporting development of a dialogic teaching stance. The second domain intentionally guides new teachers to explore classroom data and consider students as knowledge resources in shaping instruction. The third domain sustains dialogue about discussion processes and evolving conceptions of dialogism in small groups of preservice teacher collectives, enabling sharing of inquiry data, emerging findings, and dilemmas of practice. Drawing upon a larger database, we present a case study demonstrating one preservice teacher’s inquiry work with deep analysis of student talk, detailed memoing processes featuring challenges and benefits of developing dialogic teaching practices, thoughtful criticism of long-established discussion practices, and discoveries about nuances of dialogic teaching. Our case contributes to the literature by presenting an example of dialogic pedagogy for teacher education, in service of preservice teachers learning to lead classroom discussions. Additional innovative pedagogical designs are needed to assist teachers in gaining complex knowledge and practice for teaching and promoting meaningful and learning-rich talk in K-12 classrooms
Dialogic pedagogy in democratically run schools: Introduction
Full text linkThe introduction to this special issue has the particular purpose of presenting the philosophical and educational approach of democratic schooling and its practices to readers interested and knowledgeable in Dialogic Pedagogy but without enough information about Democratic education. Namely, many scholars of dialogic pedagogy are not very familiar with democratic schooling, if at all. The term “democratic education” is polysemic (Matusov, 2023), and many educationalists use it to refer to civic education in conventional schools. However, in this special issue, we explore the relationships between dialogic pedagogy and democratically run schools. In the article, I describe democratic education and its current spread and scarcity worldwide. Next, I examine the meaning and the uses of Dialogue in conventional and progressive education. Finally, I introduce the questions about the meaning and values of dialogic pedagogy in democratic education that guided us in putting together this Special Issue
Relationships between Democratic Education and Dialogic Education: Conclusion
Full text linkIn my conclusion, I want to return back to the issue raised by the co-editors of this special issue: what are the relationships between Democratic Education and Dialogic Education, between dialogue and democracy? For that, I consider the following three topics: 1) their polysemy, multiple meanings, of these two concepts, 2) their complementarity; and 3) their tensions and incompatibilities