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From classroom education to remote emergency education: transformations in a dialogical pedagogy proposal:
Full text linkThis paper presents how a dialogical educational proposal, inspired by Freire’s perspective, was introduced and adapted to the digital educational environment in distance teaching-learning. From Freire’s pedagogy perspective, dialogue is one of the main assumptions for the teaching-learning activity. Therefore, we developed an online environment introducing a dialogical pedagogy, considering students’ problems during the pandemic. Based on this proposition, we created a remote educational environment through the Discord platform. This platform has excellent potential to base an educational environment enabling students and teachers to engage in a dialogical activity. We investigated how the Discord platform contributes to enhancing dialogical pedagogy. Then, we introduced a dialogic activity in an initial training course for physics teachers in a discipline called “Non-Formal Education”. Nineteen students participated in the activity developed throughout the discipline. We gathered data during the classes by recording student interactions on the platform system. The analysis was based on Activity Theory to identify the situations where their agency emerged and changed the activity and what role Discord played in this through the students’ dialogue. The study explores Discord facilities to introduce the dialogical teaching methodology previously developed in the face-to-face format. Finally, we could identify that the students’ voices emerged in the interactions, given the opportunity to express their ideas on their own terms and, fundamentally, be heard and considered by others. At last, students developed agency in the remote school activity, engaging productively in the required tasks and creating a community through the platform
Bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions
Full text linkThis article explores the relationship between argumentation theory and dialogic pedagogy. Arguments made in everyday discourse tend to be enthymematic, i.e., containing implicit premises. Thus, dialogue is often necessary to uncover hidden assumptions. Furthermore, evaluating logical arguments involves dialectical and dialogic processes. We articulate the role of critical questions in this process and present the Critical Questions Model of Argument Assessment (CQMAA) as a (mostly) comprehensive framework for evaluating arguments.
Students can be taught to ask and discuss these critical questions. Yet to facilitate and sustain discussion of these questions, teachers need additional tools drawn from dialogic pedagogy. We draw on Robin Alexander’s conceptual framework for this purpose as well as Michaels and O’Connor’s work on Academically Productive Talk. Alexander’s framework includes six pedagogical principles and eight repertoires of talk. We focus specifically on teacher and student talk moves and propose that critical questions should be considered an important subset of productive talk moves that can bring rigor and purpose to classroom argumentation. Other talk moves are also needed to help students construct arguments, listen and engage with one another, and help sustain discussion of the critical questions. The CQMAA provides both a theoretical and practical link between (1) logical analysis and critique and (2) dialogic teaching
Scandinavian experiments in democratic education
Full text linkThis article is the first of four articles exploring democratic schools co-founded by teenage students in Norway and Sweden. Our larger project explores the relationship between democracy in education and educational dialogism. Both democracy in education and educational dialogism are partially rooted in the idea that education should be a personal meaning-making practice where the participants can create and organize their lives in ways that make sense to them and explore their interests, values, and desires. We describe the processes of founding two schools – one in Oslo, Norway, and the other in Gothenburg, Sweden – in which students practiced the right to democratic governance. We describe the process of the founding of these schools against the background of the students’ movements in the late 1960s and the 1970s and the social and political conditions in Norway and Sweden at that time. We explore the students’ perspectives on the possibility, desirability, and legitimacy of the students’ voices in ethical-ontological dialogues in which the participants jointly examine their relationships with the world, with others, and with themselves. Further, we explore the forms of democratic school governance that Norwegian and Swedish students created and identified tensions that appeared between the legitimacy of individual students’ rights to ownership of their learning, teachers’ ownership of teaching, and the conventional normative educational policies in Norway and Sweden
A paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: A conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting
Full text linkIn this article, I attempt to conceptually analyze points of disagreement among the students of the first democratic high school in Norway, The Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO). The clashes and disagreements among the students started heating up immediately after the school was opened in the fall of 1967. As they were learning how to run their school, the students discovered profound differences in their views of education and its purposes. Their deep disagreements about the meaning of education and conflicts about their school practices almost broke up their school right at the very start of its existence.
Their different understandings of education erupted in a passionate and dramatic general assembly meeting, which they later referred to as the Soul-Searching Assembly. This four-and-a-half hour-long meeting was recorded and its transcript was published (Hem & Remlov, 1969). In this article, I analyze the dialogues from the assembly, looking for the students’ diverse ideological and conceptual positions, views, desires, and underlying values. The tensions and clashes the students voiced echo the profound paradigmatic differences in conceptualizing education throughout the modern history of education, from the Enlightenment until now, a few decades into the 21st century. The purpose of my analysis is to examine these paradigmatically different views and the concerns behind them. These radically different paradigmatic, conceptual, and axiological positions have an effect on what we may consider being good, ethical, just, and true for human existence, human relationships, and human rights in general, and especially in education. The EGO students’ intensive and urgent ontological need to explain their very different positions to each other allowed me to take a closer look into the tensions and conflicts still existing in the larger cultural-historical public sphere of discourse on education
The transformation of the curriculum in the Linking Worlds Dialogic Pedagogy
Full text linkDialogic Pedagogy of the "Linking Worlds" is characterized by forming community classrooms incorporating a diversity of community agents who join to transform the official school curriculum in Chilean public schools. The participatory action research we report in this article was developed in two of these classrooms, one in the cultural context of a mining community and the other in a rural cultural context. The action research project aimed to make their local cultures visible in the school curriculum. Our objective was to systematize the knowledge and practices of the people who are part of community classrooms and determine whether these contributions managed to challenge the official curriculum structure. We achieved our objective in a four-year study involving 76 participants in dialogical conversations and collective dialogues. Throughout the study, we collected audiovisual records. We identified two areas of knowledge and practices that transform the official curriculum: the corporeality-affectivity and community areas. In addition, it was possible to verify that although the themes nominally coincided, the curricular transformations differed depending on the local characteristics of each classroom. These local curricular transformations promote the advancement of dialogic pedagogy because in such decisions and through egalitarian dialogue, debates, disputes, etc., different participants’ voices are heard in each community classroom. In addition, these transformations keep the debate and interpretation of school curricular contents open
Analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation using teacher roles of questioning and communicative approaches
Full text linkThe purpose of this study is to investigate how teachers use different types of discourse to support dialogic argumentation. Dialogic argumentation is a collaborative process in which students construct arguments together and examine arguments presented by their peers. Science teachers can use argumentation as a vehicle to help students gain a working understanding of science content and the nature of science and its practices. Whole-class closing discussions from video-recorded lessons are analyzed to study the discourse used to support argumentation by two physics teachers in lower secondary schools. Analysis of discourse includes coding of communicative approach at the episode level and coding of teacher roles of questioning at the level of speaking turns. Student argumentation is also assessed on the basis of dialogicity and complexity of arguments. Findings characterize different ways of orchestrating argumentative discussions. Authoritative episodes were characterized by the presence of the dispenser role, with teachers retaining ownership over ideas and classroom activities to emphasize the correctness of a justification. Dialogic episodes of classroom interaction showed openness to student perspectives, but teachers’ use of questioning roles revealed different ways of orchestrating argumentative discussions. The moderator role granted ownership of ideas to students to either pursue a single student’s argument in more depth or to directly contrast opposing justifications. Less commonly used were the roles of coach and participant, which teachers used to elicit student justifications in more depth or support students in examining the arguments of their peers. Examination of discourse using multiple frameworks revealed differences in teachers’ values and the impact of the use of teacher questioning roles on student contributions to argumentative discussions
Freedom, dialogue, and education in a democratic school
Full text linkThis article is based on two interviews between Jim Rietmulder, the founder and lead staff at The Circle School (in Harrisburg, PA), and Ana Marjanovic-Shane, an Independent Scholar and a Co-Editor of this Special Issue. We discuss and examine the daily practice and the philosophical approach of a particular democratic school as we discuss democratic education in general. The main purpose of these interviews has been to introduce democratic education and explore the place for dialogic pedagogy in a democratic school, where the students are free to choose what to study, when to study, in what ways they want to study, with whom they want to study, etc. What happens to dialogic pedagogy if the students are not engaged around the same topics together? The question is whether the students’ legitimate status of free persons with equal rights of opinion and decision-making also creates opportunities and conditions for the students to engage in the critical dialogic examinations of the world, of their life and learning, and of their desires, motivations, and values
Exploring dialogical spaces of discovery
Full text linkThis paper revisits two teacher-education contexts which we independently researched. Both contexts invested in teacher-professional transformation, presenting unique puzzles in our respective data analyses. Bringing together Bakhtinian dialogic theory and Natural Inclusionality (Rayner, 2017), we return to these puzzles in a reflective dialogue. The paper unpacks two emergent themes. The first theme details our sense-making of the dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow as part of professional development, and the second theme captures our deliberations about the energy-filled spaces of the in-between that form part of teacher development in our contexts. The paper discusses key insights about the nature of teacher-professional transformation and opportunities for mutual enrichment: insights that would not be available to us in our independent analyses. Given the non-conclusive nature of Bakhtinian dialogue, we offer no closure and avoid definitive conclusions that enforce or imply the assimilation and homogeneity of perspectives. Instead, we bring a polyphony of voices – our philosophies, contexts, professional orientations, and empirical puzzles – into a receptive-responsive relationship. We believe that the emerging dialogic problematisation has significant implications for teacher development as well as for ongoing theorisations of education. It responds to the pressing need to rethink the crucial relationship between educational theory and practice
Teacher as a benevolent dictator: Promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university
Full text linkThis essay provides a grounded critical discussion of why a professor might limit their undergraduate students’ sovereignty of educational decision-making to promote an opportunity for a democratic dialogic culture in the class situated in a conventional university. On the one hand, both democracy and dialogue require voluntary participation by the students in their education and dialogue and their sovereignty over collective decision-making and educational reasoning. On the other hand, this participation is based on the students’ socialization in a special culture which might often be at odds with their sovereignty. It is difficult for many students to freely choose democracy and dialogue in education when they are embedded in a conventional educational institution based on Kantian educational paternalism and foisted education. Also, the students are often culturally unfamiliar with such concepts as “democracy,” “dialogue,” and “self-education,” let alone their practical implications. To address these contradictions, I introduce the notion of the “teacher as a benevolent dictator.” I discuss, problematize, and analyze the forms of this benevolent dictatorship, its potential pitfalls, and promises
A Soul-searching assembly: Vignette
Full text linkIn this article, I develop a dialogic analysis of a democratic school’s General Assembly meeting in the form of a vignette. As a qualitative method, a vignette is a suitable way of preparing evidence and constructing data for further analyses. It is also an ideal medium for a full-fledged dialogic analysis of the described events and dialogues that took place among the participants. I grounded this vignette on a transcript of an audio recording of a General Assembly meeting held in the first Norwegian democratic high school – the Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO) on November 2nd, 1967, shortly after it started to work in 1967. Using the students’ voices raised in this meeting, I aimed to recreate the meeting’s dramatic atmosphere. My approach follows the art of dialogic analysis (Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, & Gradovski, 2019; Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, Kullenberg, & Curtis, 2019), as I attempt to dialogically join the students, adding my reactions and interpretations of the meeting’s unfolding debates and dialogues. I also add my dialogic replies to the students and insert other comments judging their positions dialogically in an attempt to also create rich data for further conceptual analysis, which is published in another article in this special issue, “Paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: A conceptual analysis” (see Marjanovic-Shane, 2023b)