Educational patterns for bringing value conflicts to the classroom
Submitted by:
Francesco Caviglia
Abstract:
This theory-developing, empirically-grounded paper is part of a research project for fostering ‘dialogic literacy’ with upper-secondary and university students as part of their ‘epistemic fluency’ (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2016) and, more generally, as a requirement for constructive participation in an increasingly polarised public space. Dialogic literacy has been identified as consisting of an epistemological dimension as “the ability to engage productively in discourse whose purpose is to generate new knowledge and understanding” (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 2005:756) and a relational dimension as “literacy which is responsive relationship to others and to otherness” (Wegerif, 2016:19). This paper aims at identifying ‘emerging dialogue’ in a public debate and reflecting on the factors that make it possible, with the goal of incorporating these factors into educational patterns for bringing value controversies to the classroom through oral discussion or online discussion spaces.
The authors monitored the debate that followed Copenhagen Zoo’s decision in 2015 of killing, carrying out a public autopsy and feeding to lions a healthy, young giraffe, with the argument of its lacking of genetic diversity (Parker, 2017) and chose as their empirical basis the overall remarkably dialogic comments to a YouTube video showing a TV-debate between the director of Copenhagen Zoo and an English journalist aired by BBC’s Channel Four.
Building on Tannen’s (1997) notion of dialogue as involvement, we performed a thematic analysis (Boyatzis 1995) of the about 600 comments by trying to identify participants’ efforts with a) creating, refining and discussing knowledge; and b) building and strengthening relationships with other participants. We then reflected on the conditions that made these dialogic moments possible.
Analysis and discussion suggest that dialogue emerged in conjunction with a) a process of ‘joint fact finding’ (Innes & Booher, 2010), which was possible due to the manageable complexity of the case and easy access to relevant information; b) explicit acknowledgment of the moral legitimacy of others’ viewpoints or the level of competence of other interlocutors.
Such conditions may be unusual for online debates, to the point that a participant humorously commented on the overall politeness: “Don’t you guys know this is YouTube?” And yet, dialogue emerged in the unsupervised space of that online debate. In conclusion, the case shows how value controversies and even online debate within a ‘community of those who have nothing in common’ (Biesta, 2004) ‘unrelated others’ can turn into an opportunity for growth, but only under circumstances that educational intervention may not always be able to influence.
References
Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (2005). Technology and Literacies: From Print Literacy to Dialogic Literacy. In N. Bascia, A. Cumming, A. Datnow, K. Leithwood, & D. Livingstone (Eds.), International Handbook of Educational Policy (pp. 749–762). Dordrecht: Springer.
Biesta, G. (2004). The community of those who have nothing in common: Education and the language of responsibility. Interchange, 35(3):307-324.
Boyatzis, R. E.(1995) Transforming qualitative information: Thematic analysis and code development. London: SAGE
Innes, J. E., & Booher, D. E. (2010). Planning with complexity: An introduction to collaborative rationality for public policy. London and New York: Routledge.
Markauskaite, L., & Goodyear, P. (2016). Epistemic fluency and professional education: innovation, knowledgeable action and actionable knowledge. Dordrecht: Springer.
Parker, J. (2017). “Killing animals at the Zoo”. The New Yorker, January 16th.
Online: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/16/killing-animals-at-the-zoo.
Tannen, D. (1997). Involvement as dialogue: Linguistic theory and the relation between conversational and literary discourse. In M. Macovski (Ed.), Dialogue and critical discourse (pp. 137–157). New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wegerif, R. (2016). Applying dialogic theory to illuminate the relationship between literacy education and teaching thinking in the context of the Internet Age. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 16, p. 1–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.17239/L1ESLL–2016.16.02.07