Educational Dialogues

Understanding and Promoting Productive interaction

Karen Littleton, Christine Howe, Karen Littleton, Christine Howe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135188382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Educational Dialogues provides a clear, accessible and well-illustrated case for the importance of dialogue and its significance for learning and teaching. The contributors characterise the nature of productive dialogues, to specify the conditions and pedagogic contexts within which such dialogues can most effectively be resourced and promoted.

Drawing upon a broad range of theoretical perspectives, this collection examines:

• theoretical frameworks for understanding teaching and learning dialogues
• teacher-student and student-student interaction in the curricular contexts of mathematics, literacy, science, ICT and philosophy
• the social contexts supporting productive dialogues
• implications for pedagogic design and classroom practice.

Bringing together contributions from a wide range of internationally renowned researchers, this book will form essential reading for all those concerned with the use of dialogue in educational contexts.

Part I
Productive dialogue

Introduction

The introductory chapter discussed the concept of dialogue and sketched the reasons for the strong (and growing) interest in the concept within educational circles. The chapter also summarized some of the numerous observational studies that have been published over the past 40 years, which describe the form that educational dialogue usually takes. As the studies were reviewed, it became apparent that many authors are uncomfortable with what they observed in classrooms, sensing that educational dialogue is typically less effective than it ought to be. When one study indicates that about 75 per cent of the discussion is usually off-task during group work amongst pupils (Galton et al. 1980) it is not difficult to share this pessimism. Nevertheless, recognizing that something is wrong is a far cry from knowing how to remedy it, and it is only recently that research has reached the point of providing the necessary guidance. The present section comprises four cutting-edge examples from this research.

One reason for the relatively slow progress is the all-pervading influence of Vygotsky, for while Vygotsky is undoubtedly the giant upon whose shoulders all later researchers stand, his theorizing is both utopian when applied to educational contexts and also somewhat vague. This is scarcely surprising when the theorizing took place nearly a century ago, and occurred during the Russian revolution, when aspirations for far-reaching change were extremely high. Of particular significance here is Vygotsky’s (e.g. 1978) insistence that adults (or more knowledgeable peers) guide children in the creation of social products that surpass what they are capable of individually, and that they subsequently ‘internalize’. The utopianism within such claims relates to the guided creation of superior products, for contemporary research suggests that achieving this often depends upon finely tuned adjustments that are challenging for mothers and teachers in one-to-one interaction with children (see, e.g. Wood 1986). They are virtually inconceivable in the one-to-many contexts that typify classrooms. One instance of Vygotsky’s vagueness concerns his failure to indicate whether there are alternative forms of guidance, which, while remaining helpful, are feasible in classrooms. A further instance of vagueness (recognized by Vygotsky himself – see Bereiter 1985) relates to the concept of internalization. Is individual knowledge envisaged as a copy of preceding social products, in which case the learning process must be primarily imitative? However, if individual knowledge is indeed a copy, how can it be transferred to new contexts? The purpose of formal education is not, after all, to teach students to solve specific problems, but to extrapolate principles that can be applied in a range of situations.

What is needed, then, are practical theories of educational dialogue, which take classroom realities as their starting place and focus not just on problem solving within the here-and-now but also upon transferable knowledge. It is here that the four chapters, which comprise the present section, make a contribution, for all four are sensitive to the demands of authentic educational settings and associated curriculum goals. The chapters report research conducted in four countries, with contrasting educational traditions. Theoretical assumptions differ across the chapters, as do research designs. In some cases, the research is exclusively qualitative; in other cases, it mixes qualitative and quantitative methods. Sometimes, learning outcomes are formally assessed, for instance through comparing performance on pre-tests prior to some form of intervention with performance on post-tests once the intervention is complete; in other cases, there is no formal assessment, and perhaps even a theory-driven rejection of what assessment implies. Nevertheless, despite the differences, all chapters recognize that transferable knowledge depends upon students actively constructing understanding from the possibilities presented in dialogue. Thus, productive dialogue does not foreclose options, but structures these in a fashion that permits optimum co-ordination by the students themselves. At the same time, the chapters also indicate variability in the mechanisms through which students achieve co-ordination, and practitioners need to be sensitive to this in the strategies that they use to promote productive dialogue.

The dialogic options pinpointed in Chapter 1 from Mikaela Åberg, Åsa Mäkitalo and Roger Säljö are those that arise during classroom project work, the key point being that anticipated future use in dialogue exerts a powerful influence upon how present material is prioritized. The chapter focuses upon the dialogue that was observed while 15- to 16-year-old students worked on a project relating to ‘resources and industries’. Within the first phase of the project, the students, operating in pairs, researched the issue from the perspective of specific countries, e.g. Bangladesh, Russia, Sweden, with each pair taking a different country. Subsequently, the students represented their country during a debate with representatives of the other countries. The students’ own (largely ‘environmentalist’) values influenced how they interpreted the material that they unearthed during the research phase, but of equal importance was the rhetorical demands of the anticipated debate. Because debate is itself dialogic, the implication is that by adolescence students have framed their experiences along communicative lines, perhaps differentiating amongst parent-child, friend-friend, teacher-pupil, examiner-candidate, and doctor-patient (and many more). Such framing is reminiscent of the classic cognitive psychological notion of ‘scripts’ (Schank and Abelson 1977), although it is not clear whether Åberg and colleagues would find this association helpful. Whatever the case, the researchers are subtly re-defining the concept of knowledge transfer, by indicating that the anticipated activity organized as a high-stake event in the form of a public debate structures the learning of students. Thus, the students organize their learning in anticipation of a particular situation, but they also have to respond to the arguments and claims made by others in a flexible manner. In the particular communicative genre of a debate one is held accountable both for what one knows and for how one can respond in situ to the contributions of others. In this sense, a debate is a specific rhetorical genre in which knowledge is presented but also challenged. This may be what Åberg and colleagues are referring to when, in their chapter’s concluding paragraph, they claim to have provided ‘a glimpse of a complex and extended socialization process in which the students are familiarized with how to craft descriptions and arguments in a world characterized by a multitude of potentially relevant sources of knowledge’ and how they learn to defend them in the particular genre of communication which is a debate. The point certainly needs to be borne in mind when developing strategies for shaping classroom dialogue.

Åberg, Mäkitalo and Säljö’s research is with relatively senior students, whose dialogic scripts and ability to look ahead will be relatively well developed. At younger ages, understanding of scripts will be in embryonic form, and awareness of future use may be relatively limited. In Chapter 2, Christine Howe outlines research relating to dialogue and learning during middle childhood. Some of the conclusions that she draws seem attributable to limitations in the capacities that Åberg and colleagues justifiably take for granted at older age levels. Howe’s interest is in small group activity, where students work together without direct supervision from teachers, and her chapter starts by considering studies that demonstrate the value of opinion exchange during such activity. In other words, there is copious evidence from studies of group work to confirm the emphasis placed above upon students constructing understanding from possibilities expressed in dialogue. Drawing upon her own research conducted in Scotland with 8- to 12-year-olds working on science tasks, Howe then shows that differences of opinion at this age level are seldom resolved at the time they are expressed. Rather, differences trigger a protracted period of (essentially private) post-group activity, dependent upon dialogue during group work but perhaps also upon subsequent events. This suggests internalization of social products in a rather different sense than the one envisaged by Vygotsky, and signals a relation that is the reverse of the one indicated by Åberg, Mäkitalo and Säljö. For Åberg and colleagues, future events shape present use of dialogue; for Howe, present dialogue shapes the use of future events. More precisely, for Howe, present dialogue shapes future usage in middle childhood. In the second half of her chapter, Howe summarizes research that suggests developmental changes in the processes through which students learn from dialogue. Importantly, she sees these changes as part and parcel of growing ability to co-ordinate information within and across tasks.

Amongst many other things, Chapter 3 from Kristiina Kumpulainen and Lasse Lipponen provides what may be the missing link between its two predecessors, insights into how classroom dialogue can support relatively young children in making connections across place and time. The chapter’s empirical focus is recordings made in a Finnish classroom, where 9- to 10-year-old students worked with their teacher to build upon information obtained during out-of-school visits (to a forest, science centre and technology museum). Kumpulainen and Lipponen show how the classroom teacher skilfully scaffolds connections between lesson content and experiences in other contexts, allowing the students to achieve what is termed ‘situated agency’, i.e. the ability to act authoritatively and accountably in one situation and to extend knowledge and skills to further settings. One of Kumpulainen and Lipponen’s main points is that such connectedness was only possible because the classroom ethos was that of a community of dialogically based enquiry. In other words, it cannot be achieved ‘out of the blue’, but rather depends on traditions that value talk, and specifically the exchange of views. It seems likely that many students in Kumpulainen and Lipponen’s classroom progressed via processes that are very different from the ones outlined for the equivalent age group in Howe’s chapter. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily the case that all students did this. Kumpulainen and Lipponen describe one student who flatly refused to accept the lesson ‘message’ that money can be made from wool, and another who was adamant that he had learned nothing from a trip to the forest. It would be interesting to revisit such students a few weeks after the relevant lesson to see whether their positions had changed. Following from Howe’s work, the discussions held during the lesson might have stimulated subsequent post-lesson processing, and the outcome might have been delayed learning gain.

As signalled already, one message for practitioners from the chapters reviewed so far is the need to be sensitive to multiple learning processes. The processes that students employ probably vary within and across age groups. Such variation (and the need for sensitivity within teaching situations) is underlined in the section’s concluding contribution, Chapter 4 from Valérie Tartas, Aleksandar Baucal, and Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont. Drawing upon a range of theoretical perspectives, Tartas, Baucal and Perret-Clermont summarize studies, conducted in Switzerland, where children were first trained to solve problems in one-to-one sessions with adults, and subsequently worked with fellow students to solve the same problems. T...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Productive dialogue
• Part II Understanding productive interaction in specific curricular contexts
• Part III Social context
• Part IV Promoting productive educational dialogues
• Index