Serving a Dialogic Stance?: A Big Picture Look across Oracy Repertoire During Whole Group Instruction
Submitted by:
MAUREEN BOYD
Abstract:
The principles of dialogic teaching and learning - jointly undertaken inquiries, open exchange of ideas, engagement with multiple voices and perspectives, and respectful classroom practices that cultivate student access and agency - cannot be enacted through a single talk move or literacy event (Alexander, 2008; Burbules, 2003). Rather, they necessarily involve a repertoire of talk purposes and practices that foster dialogic relations and serve a dialogic instructional stance (Author1, 2016). When teachers adopt a dialogic stance they frame and plan material and respond to student cues in response-able ways that work together to support individual and group meaning-making. Response-able talk practices are contingent on previous contributions, animate student ideas, and result in chains of exploratory student talk (Author 1, 2016).
In this session, we consider dialogic relations of classroom talk across time and across repertoire. Data are part of a two-year case study in a second grade urban classroom in a rust-belt city in the US. Participants are 23 seven-year-old students who come from diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds, and an experienced teacher with a masters in education. Focal data are 14 writing workshop minilessons comprising an instructional unit on fairytales/folklore enacted towards the end of the school year. Minilessons represent dialogue as instruction, arguably the instructional genre least associated with DT&L as the teacher purposefully employs talk toward “a definite end” (Burbules, 1993). We conduct a sociocultural discourse analysis (Mercer, 2008) of talk within and across the 14 minilessons. Our findings explicate and provide exemplification for:
-Varied questioning and uptake moves serving different purposes
-How this teacher uses concrete contingent questioning to animate and develop student ideas, and harness and cultivate student engagement and buy-in.
-Ways shared reading content and curricular goals cultivated different perspective-taking and openness to different ways of thinking.
-Discourse conditions where these second graders could respectfully disagree and defend their viewpoints.
Importantly, our study challenges local interactional patterns alone as markers of dialogic teaching and learning. Rather we look within and across minilessons at how 1)talk functions, 2)instructional purposes, and 3)scope of what is said, work together to promote dialogic relations that serve a dialogic instructional stance and support student learning.
References
Alexander, R. J. (2008). Towards dialogic teaching: Rethinking classroom talk (4th ed.). York, UK: Dialogos.
Author 1 (2016).
Burbules, N. C. (1993). Dialogue in teaching: Theory and practice. NY: Teachers College Press.
Mercer, N. (2008). The seeds of time: Why classroom dialogue needs a temporal analysis. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 17(1), 33-59.