Dialogic teaching in the initial teacher education classroom: “Everyone's Voice will be Heard”

Abstract

This study examines the impact of dialogic teaching as core pedagogy in the higher education context. It investigates how instructional design informed by Alexander’s dialogic principles and educational linguistics encouraged pre-service teachers and in-service teachers to develop professional capabilities to first recognise and then harness the power of talk for reflective learning. A discussion-based pedagogic strategy called Literature Circles was used to help reframe critical understanding of literary texts and prompt meta-awareness of dialogic teaching. One group of participants in the study was a final year cohort of pre-service teachers in a Bachelor of Education (Primary) degree at an urban university in Australia. Another group of participants were teachers in a primary school who were reviewing their use of Literature Circles. The third group of participants the school students who took part in the Literature Circles. Qualitative data from video interviews and/or focus group discussions with the three groups of participants were triangulated. Coding of data was achieved by content analysis, cross-correlating close linguistic analysis with an analytic framework based on Alexander’s five principles to create categories for the identification of perceptions about dialogic teaching. Findings from the study show that the linguistic lens provided new insights to dialogic teaching at all levels of education.

Keywords:

• Dialogue
• literature
• pedagogy
• pre-service teacher
• education
• primary school

Acknowledgements:

The researcher would like to acknowledge the assistance of the teachers, primary school and pre-service teacher education students who took part in this study. Without their cooperation, it would not be possible to complete research that depends on close observation of teacher/student interactions and reflective discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alyson Simpson is an associate professor and Pro Dean for Education. His research interests include children's literature, dialogic learning, and teacher education. His recent publications include books: The use of children’s literature in teaching: A study of politics and professionalism within teacher education (2016, Routledge) and Language, Literacy and Literature (2013, OUP) and articles: Children’s literature in the digital world: how does multimodality support affective, aesthetic and critical response to narrative? English Teaching: Practice and Critique (2015); Designing pedagogic strategies for dialogic learning in higher education, Technology, Pedagogy and Education (2015); and Integrating technology with literacy: using teacher guided collaborative online learning to encourage text response, ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology (2010).