The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education

Neil Mercer, Rupert Wegerif, Louis Major, Neil Mercer, Rupert Wegerif, Louis Major

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138338517
• eBook ISBN: 9780429806759
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

The Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education provides a comprehensive overview of the main ideas and themes that make up the exciting and diverse field of Dialogic Education. With contributions from the world's leading researchers, it describes underpinning theoretical approaches, debates, methodologies, evidence of impact, how Dialogic Education relates to different areas of the curriculum and ways in which work in this field responds to the profound educational challenges of our time.

The handbook is divided into seven sections, covering:

• The theory of Dialogic Education
• Classroom dialogue
• Dialogue, teachers and professional development
• Dialogic Education for literacy and language
• Dialogic Education and digital technology
• Dialogic Education in science and mathematics
• Dialogic Education for transformative purposes

Expertly written and researched, the handbook marks the coming of age of Dialogic Education as an important and distinctive area of applied educational research. Featuring chapters from authors working in different educational contexts around the world, the handbook is of international relevance and provides an invaluable resource for researchers and students concerned with the study of educational dialogue and allied areas of socio-cultural research. It will interest students on PhD programmes in Education Faculties, Master's level courses in Education and postgraduate teacher-training courses. The accounts of results achieved by high-impact research projects around the world will also be very valuable for policy makers and practitioners.

Section V

Dialogic education and digital technology

Section introduction

Dialogic education and digital technology

Simon Knight

The chapters in this section of the book focus specifically on dialogic education and digital technology. To frame this chapter, it is important to understand why there should be mutual interest among those who are interested in the role of dialogic approaches and the role of digital technologies in learning. At weakest, such shared theorising is important simply because technology is increasingly available (indeed, pervasive) in our everyday lives and classrooms. In this view, technologies are more or less neutral actors to be leveraged as we wish; we should thus understand how to develop dialogic approaches in this emerging context.

However, while of course rapid technological change creates an imperative to understand the impact of that change, this narrow perspective is a view that sociocultural researchers and those interested in dialogic approaches would reject. A somewhat stronger claim, then, and one that is made explicitly by Major and Warwick (this section) is that those who are interested in dialogic approaches to learning should be interested in digital technologies with respect to the affordances or possibilities for action that those technologies create for dialogue. A corollary, then, is that those interested in digital technologies should be interested in how they might develop and research tools that create or embody such affordances for dialogue and learning.

Within this context, digital tools can be seen as affording opportunity to, for example, make learning visible to students and teachers as an artefact for reflection and improvement, creating sharing space to scrutinise ideas, and showing how ideas evolve over time. Moreover, as Major and Warwick note, we care not only about the action possibilities but also the enacted affordances for dialogue – i.e., the specific ways in which the action possibilities are implicated in promotion of dialogic interaction for learning and indeed, as Rasmussen et al. note, the ways that new tools provide both new affordances (or possibilities) and obstacles.

However, a stronger claim again is that we should be interested in the relationships between dialogic approaches to learning and digital technologies for learning because dialogue is both shaped by digital technologies and helps to shape both the use and emergence of those technologies. That is, to use the language of Major and Warwick, in addition to technology creating affordances for dialogue, dialogue also creates affordances for particular uses of technology; the two are thus in mutually constitutive interaction.

Put another way, Kumpulainen, Rajala, and Kajamaa (this section) distinguish material-dialogic spaces in which the focus is (1) about artefacts of digital technologies – i.e., dialogue centred on digital technology; (2) around digital technologies – i.e., dialogue that is in the context of these technologies, a context which is expanded by the very use of those digital technologies, through their affordances for dialogue; and (3) through digital technologies, which might be characterised in terms of meaning that is mutually constituted in and through the dialogue and materiality of the digital technologies. Each of these perspectives can be seen in the chapters in this section of the handbook, each with important implications for how we understand and foster dialogue approaches, and digital technologies, for learning.

Chapters in this section

The affordances – or possibilities for action – of digital technologies for dialogic approaches are the focus of Major and Warwick’s contribution. The authors first provide an overview of a recent review of the interactions between classroom dialogue and digital technology, unpacking the significance of the notion of ‘affordances’ for our understanding of digital technology. They briefly discuss the kinds of affordances identified in the literature on classroom dialogue and digital technology, before introducing an extended exemplification in their discussion of the microblogging tool Talkwall.

Talkwall is also the focus of Rasmussen, Amundrud, and Ludvigsen’s contribution, in which they highlight the way that new technologies bring both new possibilities and constraints to interaction. As the authors note, technologies can change the nature of communication. The ways that the ground rules – the rules that people make to manage interactions in particular situations – emerge is influenced by context, and in this case, the design or affordances of a technology, and the context of its wider use. As such, where technologies – such as social media tools – have established modes of use, these practices may influence the emergence of ground rules in learning contexts.

Indeed, focusing on collaborative creativity, Pifarré notes the way that digital technologies can provide a particular kind of medium and set of artefacts that shape our thinking. Using examples from secondary education, Pifarré discusses the ways that technologies can make visible and ‘tangible’ dialogic spaces, with the technologies affording opportunities for co-creativity through physical manipulations of artefacts, the representation of ideas in the form of these artefacts, and relationship building with collaborators through the experience of working with shared artefacts.

In Kumpulainen, Rajala, and Kajamaa’s terms, this interactivity comes about because of the ways that technologies provide material artefacts that become ‘social objects’. These ‘social objects’ emerge from the way that material objects – in this example, those created in secondary education maker spaces – are integrated into dialogic learning contexts. The authors discuss the range of ways that dialogue is oriented about, around, and through these material objects for dialogic learning.

Of course, a key affordance of digital technologies for dialogic learning is that by making visible dialogue and material artefacts to learners and educators, the technologies also gather and store such data for further analysis and reflection. This affordance is the subject of Trausan-Matu’s contribution, which discusses the ways that technology can help us to analyse dialogic learning and support it. Trausan-Matu highlights the polyphonic characteristic of dialogic learning, its coherence, and diversity, and the need for inter-animation of voices to create this polyphony. In discussing how we might use computational tools to analyse polyphony in learning data, the author highlights four key considerations: (1) how do ideas – expressed through shared language, such as repeated phrases – appear and reappear throughout a dialogue; (2) how do these ideas explicitly and implicitly refer to previous parts of the dialogue, both over time (the way we repeat key phrases) and across voices (the way we bring multiple ideas together); (3) how we look for voices to converge, without conflict, or to diverge potentially to create new ideas; (4) and how ideas are inter-animated, debated across voices, to create convergence.

The affordances of a key technology – Knowledge Forum – to support these processes and their analysis is a focus of Chan, Tong, and van Aalst’s contribution. The authors highlight the significant potential of kinds of knowledge creation or knowledge building (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014) in not only critiquing arguments and engaging with other’s ideas but in collectively creating new knowledge. As in Trausan-Matu’s contribution, the role of the technology as both a site for the dialogic, and its analytic potential, are highlighted, as well as their pedagogic implementation in classrooms, to create the environment for knowledge building.

Such interactions appear particularly significant in a context where the role of technology in democracies is increasingly under the spotlight. The potential of CSCL technologies to foster democratic participation is the focus of Slakmon and Schwarz’s contribution. They draw attention to the important questions of: who participates in representation or governance (and how; whether as rulers or ruled); how they participate in these practices; and how practices are seen as legitimate governance or otherwise. As the authors note, dialogic approaches are fundamental to such questions; they concern how people engage on issues about which they may have no formal training, with people who may disagree with them, to develop civic participation. They thus argue for the potential of democratisation with CSCL, to develop civic participation.

Similarly, Kleine Staarman, and Ametller foreground the potential of dialogic uses of digital technologies beyond the classroom environment. In their contribution the authors note that technology can support students in making connections between their formal and informal learning experiences, with teachers, to develop shared understanding and a learning trajectory. In this view, dialogue isn’t just about exchange but about the way that language is used relationally, and the ways that technology can reshape these practices, where technology is used not only to support activity but where activity occurs because of (‘invoked by’) the technology.

The potential of such pedagogical link building is particularly significant in the context of connections between formal learning and workplace contexts, as Ligorio, Amenduni, and McLay discuss, drawing on examples from higher education. In their contribution the role of technology, identity, group work, and ‘trialogicical objects’ is discussed, to highlight how collaboratively created objects can support and structure interactions, to become boundary-objects, that are designed by one community (here, university students), for us by another (here, e-learning customers). Identity and practice are key to understanding dialogue and technology use in this approach to understand how we position ourselves. This positioning occurs in the context of – dialogue and technology mediated – experiences such as those at university and professional practice, and these experiences impact on how we position ourselves with respect to communities.

Directions in dia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of editors
• List of contributors
• Introduction to the Routledge International Handbook of Research on Dialogic Education
• SECTION I The theory of dialogic education
• SECTION II Classroom dialogue
• SECTION III Dialogue, teachers and professional development
• SECTION IV Dialogic education for literacy and language
• SECTION V Dialogic education and digital technology
• SECTION VI Dialogic education in science and mathematics
• SECTION VII Dialogic education for transformative purposes
• Index