Discourse, Dialogue and Technology Enhanced Learning

Rachel Pilkington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415631730
• eBook ISBN: 9781317429104
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Discourse, Dialogue and Technology Enhanced Learning is invaluable to all those wanting to explore how dialogic processes work and how we facilitate them. Dialogue is an important learning tool and it is by understanding how language affects us and how we use language to encourage, empathise, inquire, argue and persuade that we come closer to understanding processes of change in ourselves and our society.

Most researchers in Education will find themselves interpreting some form of data in the form of words; whether these words be explanations, conversations, narrations, reflections, debates or interviews and whether they are conducted through digital media or face-to-face. Discourse, textual or spoken, is therefore central to researching education. Each chapter focuses on the ways in which alternative levels of discourse analysis provide tools for the researcher, enabling insights into the way language works in learning, teaching practice and wider society.

Drawing on the author's own 'DISCOUNT' discourse analysis coding scheme and including a wide range of dialogue examples, this book covers:

• Why Dialogue? The Role of Dialogue in Education.
• Debate: Learning to Argue and Arguing to Learn
• Towards Meaning-Making: Inquiry, Narrative and Experience
• The Role of the Significant Other: Facilitation, Scaffolding and Mediation
• Inclusion, Collaboration and Community
• Media, Mode and Digital Literacy
• Researching Voices and Texts

Discourse, Dialogue and Technology Enhanced Learning will be an essential resource for all students, educators and educational researchers who have an interest in the role of discourse in educational contexts.

1

WHY DIALOGUE?

The role of dialogue in education

The power of discourse to change understanding has been recognised at least since Socrates. Discourse is language consisting of more than one simple sentence connected in the form of a text or conversation. Participating in dialogue is thought to be a powerful tool for learning. In particular, forms of inquiry-based dialogue such as Socratic dialogue are thought to develop critical thinking by providing a bridge between more formal written discourses, such as the essay, and informal, spoken argument. Andrews (2003) captures the essence of how the Socratic form works in discussing a dialogue between Socrates and Lysis:

Dialogue example 1.1 Socratic-style dialogue

Socrates:	I dare say, Lysis, that your father and mother love you very much?
Lysis:	Certainly, Socrates.
Socrates:	Then they would wish you to be as happy as possible?
Lysis:	Yes.
Socrates:	Is a person happy when he is a slave and cannot do what he likes?
Lysis:	I should think not.

(Reproduced with permission from Andrews 2003: 122)

In the Lysis dialogue (dialogue example 1.1) Socrates, through a series of questions, leads Lysis to consider why his parents might love him, want him to be happy and yet not always let him do as he likes. There is a realisation that the two concepts – their love for him and (what he imagines to be) his happiness – can be in tension with each other. This is a platform from which larger questions and concepts, for example, personal liberty versus (social or moral) responsibility, even altruism, can emerge. The case moves from the specific, familiar and concrete to the more abstract, conceptual and philosophical.

Adopting such Socratic, rhetorical forms of argument can help us to step back from our own subjective viewpoint in order to weigh evidence more systematically. Further, in academic writing, playing out the argument between our current view and an imaginary counter-voice can be a powerful tool in helping us reflect upon the explanatory power of our case. In a similar way, Socratic dialogue can provide us with a process for making decisions, conducting negotiations or resolving disputes.

But although Socratic dialogue can help us achieve these things, it remains only a tool. Its power lies in helping to bring us to a place recognised by Piaget (1978) as necessary to changing conceptual belief – an uncomfortable place to be – where we can see that two ideas about the world which we hold to be true are actually inconsistent with each other. The way in which we are brought to this state of cognitive conflict and what we do next will determine whether we actually change what we think (Limón 2001). Alternative options are to ignore inconsistency or produce new, incomplete or inconsistent ideas. However, occasionally, we break through into a more complete and consistent world view, or a radically new conceptual model from which real and practical benefits flow.

The practical benefits of the Lysis dialogue might not be obvious. Bruner (1990) points to Halliday (1975) in suggesting possible discourse functions: the first is a pragmatic one in which the objective is to persuade another to act in a particular way. Alternatively, the participants might seek to help each other clarify their thinking by practising the rhetorical art of persuasion. Third, there is a mathetic function in which, by imagining an inner voice playing out the counter-arguments, we learn to reason something out for ourselves.

For mediators working with children who have behavioural difficulties ‘Lysis-like’ dialogue-scenarios that encourage us to consider the consequences of our actions upon how others feel can be helpful. A child might sincerely believe that their parents don’t let them do what they like because they do not love them. As Kramer writes, ‘Pouting and crying, tantrums and yelling, stealing and running away. It seems as if there are an infinite number of ways in which children can express their displeasure to us’ (Kramer 1996: online).

Kramer describes the case of a son running up a large phone bill to his girlfriend. The son was upset that the mother would not help him to see his girlfriend, that she talked sarcastically/patronisingly about her moving away to another city, and felt his mother did not take his feelings seriously. However, the girlfriend’s father had forbidden them to meet and the mother felt her son had not taken either this or the consequences of the misuse of the phone (running up large bills) seriously. Kramer writes that through mediation both mother and son were able to obtain a deeper understanding of the consequences of their behaviour on each other.

Although there are many forms of mediation and different stances are taken regarding how neutral, directive or facilitative a mediator may be, mediators aim to help people in conflict (Alexander 2008). Very often the key to this process is to develop listening skills and to help both sides really hear each other’s point of view. Enabling a child who is out of control to realise that parents need to limit personal freedom and that this can even be an expression of love, might seem impossible. The role of the mediator is, however, clearly an important one for bringing us to a place where we reflect upon our actions and, perhaps, realise they are inconsistent with our longer-term goals or the needs of those we love. How do we learn to regulate our actions and become our own mediators?

Vygotsky (1986), in his work on the conceptual development of the child, discusses the development of internal speech which we use to mediate our actions in and on the world. This internal speech, which some equate with our conscious reasoning, is at first external and mediated by interaction with parents, teachers and others significant to us as we grow. As young children, talking with parents, teachers and siblings helps us to regulate our attention and behaviour and as growing children, when we learn to regulate our behaviour for the first time, we hold similar conversations with ourselves – often talking to ourselves out loud.

Vygotsky (1978) used the term zone of proximal development to describe the way in which, when working with an adult or more advanced child, the child can perform on-task at a level superior to that when alone. Bruner (1975) uses the term scaffold to describe strategies employed by teachers and carers to support such performance. In dialogue example 1.2 a pre-school child is observed being supported by her mother in the process of constructing a jigsaw puzzle (see Appendix 1 for transcript conventions).

Dialogue example 1.2 Informal scaffolding observed between the author’s sister and niece

Mother:	Tip them out of the box!
Child:	((turns the box upside down and pieces fall on to the floor))
Mother:	That’s it! Turn them over
Child:	((turns some pieces face up then picks up one piece and holds it, looking at it and turns it over))
Mother:	You’ve missed some . . . let’s turn these over

((starts turning some of the remaining pieces over))

Child:

Sun!

((holds out a piece to the mother – the piece has part of the sun on it))

Mother:	Yes, it’s a sun isn’t it ↑ Well done! Where does the sun go↑
Child:	Sky!
Mother:	That’s right! Put it in the sky
Child:	((puts the piece down in the top right hand corner))
Mother:	Shall we find some more sky↑ What colour is the sky↑ . . .
Child:	Bl::ue sky ((points to the sky on the jigsaw piece))
Mother:	It’s blue isn’t it↑ The sky’s blue . . . Can you see any more sky↑
Child:	((picks up a piece))
Mother:	That’s not sky↑↓ That’s grass . gre::en grass! Find me some more blue sky

In dialogue example 1.2, the verbal interaction of the mother mediates the attention and activity of the child and, through the verbal interaction, the mother refers to the concept of colour and guides the child in distinguishing between colour categories as a means of distinguishing between another two concepts, sky and grass. She provides positive and corrective feedback not only verbally, as when the child picks up and identifies the sun, or in correcting her when she chooses green grass instead of blue sky, but also in and through her own actions, for example, in demonstrating how to turn over all the pieces. Throughout the dialogue the mother is in primary control of the script or ‘action plan’ and directs the child through the problem-solving activity, but the child is also able to change the precise course of the plan and conversation – as when labelling the piece called sun. If she had picked up a different piece the puzzle would have begun elsewhere and the opportunity to talk about the concepts of sky or colour might not have arisen. Control, in this informal learning, is shared or negotiated and if the child decides midway to play with her doll instead, she does. In this way the mother provides a supporting scaffold, ‘forever on the growing edge of the child’s competence’ (Bruner 1986: 77).

Later, when playing alone the child can be overheard to imitate the mother. For example, saying, ‘tip out!’ when turning the box over, indicating at least the beginning of the process of learning to use some of the more invariant steps of the jigsaw script to mediate her own independent play. Rather than, as Piaget (1929) did, viewing such speech (apparently for self alone) as ‘egocentric’, Vygotsky viewed this as a necessary intermediary stage. In this stage the child continues to invite the playfellow to help scaffold their activity while learning to imitate the speech of the grown-up as a means of regulating their own behaviour. Once the need to invite others into these processes is outgrown (for specific tasks or skills) these conversations become increasingly silent and internal – they become our plans, goals and routine scripts for action that are, increasingly, compiled and unconscious.

We know that dialogue is a powerful tool for learning. Sharing experience is recognised as a key way in which we not only transmit our culture but construct new meaning and come to share common values and understandings (Mercer 2000; Mercer and Littleton 2007). Importantly, socio-cultural learning theory suggests that where we remain at the lea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Discourse, Dialogue and Technology Enhanced Learning
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why Dialogue? The Role of Dialogue in Education
• 2 Debate: Learning to Argue and Arguing to Learn
• 3 Towards Meaning-Making: Inquiry, Narrative and Experience
• 4 The Role of the Significant Other: Facilitation, Scaffolding and Mediation
• 5 Inclusion, Collaboration and Community
• 6 Media, Mode and Digital Literacy
• 7 Researching Voices and Texts
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index