This book provides a wide-ranging and in-depth theoretical perspective on dialogue in teaching. It explores the philosophy of dialogism as a social theory of language and explains its importance in teaching and learning. Departing from the more traditional teacher-led mode of teacher–student communication, the dialogic approach is more egalitarian and focuses on the discourse exchange between the parties. Authors explore connections between dialogic pedagogy and sociocultural learning theory, and argue that dialogic interaction between teacher and learners is vital if instruction is to lead to cognitive development. The book also presents prosody as a critical resource for understanding between teachers and students, and includes some of the first empirical studies of speech prosody in classroom discourse.
This book provides a wide-ranging and in-depth theoretical perspective on dialogue in teaching. It explores the philosophy of dialogism as a social theory of language and explains its importance in teaching and learning. Departing from the more traditional teacher-led mode of teacher–student communication, the dialogic approach is more egalitarian and focuses on the discourse exchange between the parties. Authors explore connections between dialogic pedagogy and sociocultural learning theory, and argue that dialogic interaction between teacher and learners is vital if instruction is to lead to cognitive development. The book also presents prosody as a critical resource for understanding between teachers and students, and includes some of the first empirical studies of speech prosody in classroom discourse.
Dialogic Pedagogy: The Importance of Dialogue in Teaching and Learning
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Overview
This book provides a wide-ranging and in-depth theoretical perspective on dialogue in teaching. It explores the philosophy of dialogism as a social theory of language and explains its importance in teaching and learning. Departing from the more traditional teacher-led mode of teacher–student communication, the dialogic approach is more egalitarian and focuses on the discourse exchange between the parties. Authors explore connections between dialogic pedagogy and sociocultural learning theory, and argue that dialogic interaction between teacher and learners is vital if instruction is to lead to cognitive development. The book also presents prosody as a critical resource for understanding between teachers and students, and includes some of the first empirical studies of speech prosody in classroom discourse.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783096237 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 08/18/2016 |
| Series: | New Perspectives on Language and Education , #51 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 289 |
| File size: | 702 KB |
About the Author
David Skidmore is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Bath, UK. He has worked in the field for over 20 years and is a member of the editorial board of Language and Education. His research interests include pedagogy, dialogue, inclusive education and prosody.
Kyoko Murakami is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research interests include social remembering, discursive psychology, cultural psychology, cultural historical activity theory, dialogic pedagogy and social and community psychology.
David Skidmore is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Bath, UK. He has worked in the field for over 20 years and is a member of the editorial board of Language and Education. His research interests include pedagaogy, dialogue, inclusive education and prosody.
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Dialogic Pedagogy
The Importance of Dialogue in Teaching and Learning
By David Skidmore, Kyoko Murakami
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2016 David Skidmore, Kyoko Murakami and the authors of individual chaptersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78309-623-7
CHAPTER 1
Dialogic Pedagogy: An Introduction
David Skidmore and Kyoko Murakami
Freire's Theory of Dialogic Pedagogy
Credit for initiating the theory of dialogic pedagogy belongs to Paulo Freire. His perspective is outlined in his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1993 [1970]), and further developed in other books such as Pedagogy for Liberation, jointly authored with Ira Shor (Freire & Shor, 1987). In most of the rest of this book, we draw more directly on dialogism, a theory of language associated with the Bakhtin Circle (Brandist, 2002), than on Freire's work. However, it is appropriate to acknowledge at the outset that without Freire there would be no theory of dialogic pedagogy, and his thinking has been enormously influential on the tradition of critical pedagogy that has emerged out of his pioneering work. We do not, therefore, see the perspective developed in this book as counterposed to Freire's vision, but as complementary to it. We have drawn on different theoretical sources to undertake a dialectical development of a view of pedagogy which has its origins in Freire's work. The understanding of language as socio-verbal interaction which derives from Bakhtinian dialogism enables us to pay close attention to patterns of teacher–student communication in naturalistic classroom conditions, to scrutinise them in fine detail and to illustrate alternative modes of interaction to the dominant form of teacher-led recitation. It would be wrong to suggest that Freire ignored this level of analysis in his own work, and indeed he has many suggestions to make which translate quite directly into possibilities to be explored in the concrete practice of teaching. However, later research has investigated classroom discourse empirically and revealed an in-depth picture of typical modes of interaction in this context and ways in which this can be challenged, in a manner which was implicit but sometimes left underdeveloped in Freire's more theoretical work. We begin, though, with a brief overview of some of the main aspects of Freire's pedagogic theory, so that readers who are not already familiar with it will be able to trace the connections between his work on dialogic pedagogy and our own position.
Freire's work developed in the context of adult literacy education in Brazil at a time when there was a high rate of illiteracy among the adult population. He was forced to leave the country following a military coup in 1964, and continued to develop his pedagogic theory during a long period of exile, first in Chile and later in the United States. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he drew a distinction between the 'banking concept of education' and 'problem-posing education', which has much in common with the outlook on teaching and learning which we discuss in the rest of this book. In the banking concept of education, according to Freire, 'knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing' (Freire, 1993 [1970]: 53). In problem-posing education, by contrast, the teacher enters into dialogue with her/his students, acknowledging them as fellow beings capable of consciousness and intentionality, and treats them as co-investigators into the nature of reality. Freire's description is worth quoting at length (Freire, 1993 [1970]: 64–65):
Banking education ... attempts, by mythicizing reality, to conceal certain facts which explain the way human beings exist in the world; problem-posing education sets itself the task of demythologizing. Banking education resists dialogue; problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality. Banking education treats students as objects of assistance; problem-posing education makes them critical thinkers. Banking education inhibits creativity and domesticates (although it cannot completely destroy) the intentionality of consciousness by isolating consciousness from the world, thereby denying people their ontological and historical vocation of becoming more fully human. Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of persons as beings who are authentic only when engaged in enquiry and creative transformation. ... Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming – as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality.
In fact, for Freire, in dialogic pedagogy, the strict opposition between teacher and students is transcended, so that it becomes more appropriate to speak of the 'teacher-student' thinking with 'students-teachers' (Freire, 1993 [1970]: 61).
Freire develops the theory of dialogic pedagogy further in A Pedagogy for Liberation (Freire & Shor, 1987). Here he offers the following definition of dialogue:
Dialogue is a moment where humans meet to reflect on their reality as they make and remake it. ... Dialogue seals the relationship between the cognitive subjects, those who know, and who try to know. ... Dialogue is the sealing together of the teacher and the students in the joint act of knowing and re-knowing the object of study. (Freire & Shor, 1987: 98–100)
In the discussion with Shor presented in this book, Freire stresses that it is a mistake to think of dialogic pedagogy as a mere technique, a teaching method that can be mechanically transposed to any setting. Rather, it should be seen as an epistemological position, founded on an understanding of knowing as a social activity, albeit one that has an individual dimension; at the same time, it is a political practice, since it embodies a challenge to traditional forms of teacher–student relations, in which the teacher is the one who 'knows' and transfers this knowledge into students' minds by telling them what s/he knows. For Freire, this kind of teacherly authority socialises students into passivity, whereas dialogic pedagogy invites them to participate actively in reshaping their own understanding of reality, and demonstrates in practice the possibility of an alternative mode of communicative practice in the classroom or other learning setting (Freire & Shor, 1987: 46).
At the same time, Freire is clear that the relationship between students and teacher in a dialogic classroom is not one of equality (Freire & Shor, 1987: 92). Generally speaking, the teacher has greater experience of the activity of education, and may have a wider range of knowledge, both of the world and of disciplinary content, on which to draw. For Freire, this means that the teacher has a leadership responsibility; s/he is the leader of the learning process, but also 're-learns' the material with the students in the course of teaching them. Likewise, the dialogic classroom (or other group learning environment) is not a free for all in which anything goes. The teacher exercises authority in steering the development of the collective learning activity, and if a student takes advantage of the openness of the discussion to disrupt dialogue (for example, by verbally bullying other students or insulting the teacher), then the teacher will chastise them. Nevertheless, the teacher's authority rests on a different basis from that of the authoritarian teacher who demands obedience to their every word and discourages questioning of or challenge to the determinate knowledge that they present. The dialogic teacher's authority has a democratic character, and requires them to demonstrate in practice their competence in directing the learning process to students. It is earned on the basis of experience rather than compelled in advance of mutual engagement, and rests on the basis of a respect for the other that bridges the gap between their different social positions. The democratic nature of the teacher's authority also means that not everyone has to speak in the course of a dialogic lesson. Students will make a contribution when they have something to add to what has already been said, but they should not be forced to respond for the sake of it (in contrast to the norm in teacher-led recitation lessons, when the teacher typically nominates the next student speaker, who must then answer the question asked by the teacher). Finally, Freire and Shor favour a model of the curriculum which starts from the everyday knowledge that students bring with them to the classroom, and validates reflection and critical examination of their experience of the world outside the classroom as a point of departure for the learning process (Freire & Shor, 1987: 48, 107). The dialogic method can be used in areas of the curriculum which have traditionally relied heavily on a textbook-centred, body-of-knowledge transmission approach. For example, physics students can be asked to research the cosmological views held by workers, people in the streets or members of their local neighbourhood community, and compare these with their own understanding, as an entry into reflecting on the historicity of scientific theories and their place in society. Dialogic pedagogy need not be confined to subjects like literacy education or the humanities.
The strengths of Freire's work lie in its clear commitment to a revolutionary political perspective and his insistence that, through a critical, problem-posing educational praxis in which the educator is a 'teacher-student' working alongside and with 'student-teachers', dialogic pedagogy can enable the oppressed to penetrate the veil of mystifying ideology and derive interventions that bring about real social change. As noted above, he has many practical suggestions to offer which are of service to educators trying to work in this way under the unfavourable conditions we often encounter in underfunded schools and colleges in a capitalist society, where dialogic pedagogy necessarily involves 'swimming against the stream'. We hope that in what follows, by drawing extensively on the wider dialogic theory of language developed by scholars in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, we can add another dimension to the theory of dialogic pedagogy which Freire initiated, thereby building on and developing the legacy of his thought.
What is Dialogism?
Dialogism is a philosophy of language which places central importance on the reality of socio-verbal interaction in understanding the kind of phenomenon that language is. It is most associated with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), a Russian literary scholar, although important aspects of the theoretical perspective find their most fully developed statements in the writings of other members of the Bakhtin Circle, and sometimes in work by other authors who were not formally connected with this network (Brandist, 2002). According to this outlook, before it is anything else, language is a tool for communication. Every concrete instance of language use involves an address to some other participant in the act of communication, whether that be a friend, partner or work colleague to whom we are speaking directly in a face-to-face encounter, or the implicit readership of a written text that might have been set down centuries ago by an unknown hand. There are of course many degrees of immediacy and distance between these two extremes, and a wide range of possibilities in the number of people who might be involved in the communicative exchange. Everyday speech is commonly exchanged between two participants in a transient social encounter that happens in the here-and-now and is then gone for ever, in the sense of there being no lasting record of what is said. On the other hand, one thinks of the Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 and now heading into interstellar space, which carries a record containing audio recordings of spoken greetings from Earth in many different languages, from ancient Akkadian to Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. There is no knowing if or when this message will ever reach beings capable of interpreting it, but the very act of encoding speech produced by humans rather than random noise implies an attempt at communication, premised on the possibility that there might be 'someone out there' who would recognise the dialogic character of this artefact, i.e. that it represents someone else trying to say 'hello'.
In Chapter 2, Skidmore presents some of the core concepts of dialogism as a theory of language and its place in the workings of society. He emphasises in particular the implications of these ideas for pedagogy and the practice of education, with a particular focus on the sphere of language education. Since the translation and discovery of much of Bakhtin's work in the English-speaking West in the 1970s and 1980s, the secondary literature on dialogism has become voluminous and is constantly growing. It is not our purpose in this book to attempt to deal with the many different interpretations of this tradition that have been put forward in the disciplines of cultural studies, literary theory, social psychology and linguistics (Bell & Gardiner, 1998; Hirschkop, 1999; Morson, 1981). Our aim is a more limited one: to develop a theory of dialogic pedagogy that is rooted in the insights of the founding texts of this tradition of thought. This does not depend on the rather tenuous evidence about whether Bakhtin ever wrote directly on the topic of education (Matusov, 2004). Dialogism as a philosophy of language is broader than Bakhtin's work, and if we are to tease out its significance for educational praxis, we need to delve deeper into the tradition than simply identifying the scattered allusions to instruction that can be found in his writing. In spite of the limited scope of this book, our coverage of the concepts developed in this body of work is necessarily selective. It is in the spirit of dialogism to recognise that any individual text, such as this one, is only one contribution to an unfinalised discussion about approaches to pedagogy. We hope that, nevertheless, it will provide a sufficient idea of the flavour of this philosophy to provoke readers to explore the works referred to for themselves.
Prosody
Much educational research has studied typical structural features of classroom discourse, such as the three-part sequence of teacher question–student answer–teacher feedback found in schoolrooms throughout the world. However, research into the prosody of teacher–student dialogue is in its infancy, and we are pleased that Chapters 10–13 of this book carry some of the first empirical studies of how this important phenomenon functions in pedagogic talk. Prosody has been described as the music of speech (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 1996a; Wennerstrom, 2001). The term corresponds to our common-sense idea of 'tone of voice' and refers to parameters of the speaking voice which vary dynamically during face-to-face interaction. Chief features include: intonation; loudness; and temporal phenomena such as rhythm, tempo, and pauses (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 1996b; Szczepek Reed, 2006). Figure 1.1 presents a visual model of how speech varies continuously along these parameters. It is organically linked to the dialogic theory of language through the related concept of evaluative accent (Voloshinov, 1973 [1929]), according to which every utterance conveys a value judgement, an evaluative orientation towards its (referential) theme (marked most obviously in speech by intonation). This connection is further discussed in Chapters 2 and 10.
Prosody is integral to spoken communication and conveys an extra dimension of meaning beyond what is articulated through the words alone (vocabulary and syntax). Research shows that speakers use prosody for a number of communicative purposes, including: to place emphasis on new or important items of information in an utterance; to lend coherence to shared discourse, indicating how turns by different participants are tied together into a cohesive, jointly assembled text; and to express their constantly shifting emotional stance towards the interaction-in-progress, for example the degree of enthusiasm or interest they feel for the current topic of discussion (Szczepek Reed, 2006; Wennerstrom, 2001). Speakers show acute sensitivity to one another's prosody in spontaneous dialogue and use prosody as a resource to convey subtle nuances of expression; for example, when conversation is flowing smoothly, there tends to be a regular rhythm of stressed syllables which is maintained across turns by different speakers and, conversely, a breakdown in this rhythm often signals a difficulty or difference of perspective which needs to be negotiated (Wennerstrom, 2001). Researchers working in the field of conversation analysis (CA) were among the first to draw attention to the significance of prosody for the accomplishment of social actions through talk-in-interaction (Sacks, 1992; Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff, 1998; ten Have, 1998), and most recent work draws on the findings and system of transcription developed in this tradition (Couper-Kuhlen & Ford, 2004; Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 1996a; Ford et al., 1996).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dialogic Pedagogy by David Skidmore, Kyoko Murakami. Copyright © 2016 David Skidmore, Kyoko Murakami and the authors of individual chapters. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents
1. David Skidmore and Kyoko Murakami: Introduction
2. David Skidmore: Dialogism and Education
3. Harry Daniels: Vygotsky and Dialogic Pedagogy
4. Michelle Brinn: Bohm and Buber on Dialogue
5. David Skidmore: Classroom Discourse: A Survey of Research
6. David Skidmore: Pedagogy and Dialogue
7. Julie Esiyok: Small Group Writing Conference
8. Jean Baptiste Kremer: Giving Learners a Voice
9. David Skidmore: Authoritative vs. Internally Persuasive Discourse
10. David Skidmore: Once More with Feeling
11. David Skidmore and Kyoko Murakami: Prosody and Shifts in Footing
12. Xin Zhao, David Skidmore and Kyoko Murakami: Prosodic Chopping
13. David Skidmore and Kyoko Murakami: Claiming our Own Space: Polyphony in Teacher-Student Dialogue
Appendix
What People are Saying About This
If you're looking for evidence of the importance of talk in student learning then this is the book for you. Drawing on a range of theoretical and empirical sources, it pays close attention to the development of a dialogic pedagogy in teacher-student and student-to-student interactions. Most importantly it reminds us of the importance of prosody, or tone of voice, to the achievement of shared understanding in teacher-student and peer-to-peer interaction.