How to frame other people’s thinkingg? - Dialogic inquiry of literature.
Submitted by:
Tina Høegh
Abstract:
Research has shown that student centered dialog still is a rare form in classrooms (Reznitskaya 2012; Lyle 2008). Student centered dialog is communicative formats that supports the student’s own thinking and further elaborations. It is difficult for the teacher to send the thinking and reasoning back to the students (Sulzer 2015; Beck & McKeown 2007). Instead we find forms of discourse where the teacher takes responsibility and control over the knowledge and questions to ask and answer in the interaction around texts: “[...] recitation and, more recently, pseudo-inquiry continue to dominate teacher–student communication” (Reznitskaya & Gregory 2013: 129). At the same time, the whole-class dialog is still considered to be important for interpretation, meaning construction and consolidation of knowledge in the classroom.
In the presentation, I suggest and discus methodologies of research in and development and practice of inquiry based literature education generated with teachers and their teams.
The investigation is part of a large-scale intervention project named Quality in Danish and Mathematics (KiDM). KiDM is a nationwide research- and development project involving more than a hundred schools and thirty researchers through 2016-2018. In the part concerning L1, Danish, the intention is to investigate and develop literature teaching in grade 7-8 by establishing og continuously adjusting (theory of change approach) an inquiry based literature teaching. The project is designed as a multifaceted intervention program with four continuous phases: 1) a preliminary study and systematic review over research, 2) development of the intervention and pilot study of a web-mediated teaching material developed, realized and evaluated in cooperation with teachers in twenty schools, 3) a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in three iterative cycles that will test the intervention’s quantitative effect, and 4) qualitative studies that investigates the subject specific qualities the intervention leads to from student and teacher perspectives in a local school and classroom context.
My hypothesis is, that since KiDM’s focus is inquiry based literature teaching, a change of the teacher’s management of the classroom dialog will be a crucial point to intervene.
The current investigation is carried out as part of the qualitative research (4) and conducted as a field study with three researchers present doing video-observation, taking field notes, and interviewing teacher and students. Theoretically the basis is sociocultural and phenomenological interest in the participants’ collaborative processes as well as a first-person perspective (Høegh 2017). I focus on operationalization of a) outlining the features of the classroom dialog before and after the intervention in the teacher-team by a dialogic tool for the team's development of inquiry based teaching; b) the collection of the individual teacher's as well as the local teacher-team’s opinion, use and further development of the dialogic tool; and c) the collection of both the teacher’s and a number of students’ experiences with the realized classroom dialog.
In the presentation I discus the hypothesis about dialogic teaching as a key for inquiry based literature studies in the classroom. Secondly, I discus the conditions for and the capability through to this intervention to change classroom dialog. Thirdly, I will discuss methodological conflicts and possibilities.
Keywords:
Dialogic inquiry education, inquiry based literature teaching, intervention, teacher team development.
References:
Beck, I. L. & McKeown, M. G. (2007) How Teachers Can Support Productive Classroom Talk: Move the Thinking to the Students. in Rosalind Horowitz (Ed.) Talking Texts: How Speech and Writing interact in School learning (p. 207-220). New York: Routledge.
Høegh, T. (2017). Methodological issues in analyzing human communication – the complexities of multimodality. In D. Duncker, & B. Perregaard (Eds.), Creativity and Continuity: Perspectives on the Dynamics of Language Conventionalisation (Chapter 4, pp. 83-127). Copenhagen: U Press.
Lyle, S. (2008). Dialogic Teaching: Discussing Theoretical Contexts and Reviewing Evidence from Classroom Practice. Language & Education: An International Journal, 22(3), 222-240.
Sulzer, M.A. (2015) Exploring Dialogic teaching with middle and secondary English language art teachers: a reflexive phenomenology. PhD thesis, University of Iowa: http://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1912 (visited Oct.29, 2016)
Reznitskaya, A. (2012). Dialogic teaching: Rethinking Language Use During Literature Discussions. The Reading Teacher, 65(7), 446–456. Wiley on behalf of The international Literacy Association.
Reznitskaya, A. & Gregory, M. (2013) Student Thought and Classroom Language: Examining the Mechanisms of Change in Dialogic Teaching. EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIST, 48(2), 114–133.