“One challenge facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing critical literacies and civic capacities. We must address education’s role in encouraging students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to addressing important social issues and being alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy”
— Giroux, 2016
Assuming the role of the monolithic authoritarian teacher, instructing from the front of the classroom, didactically disseminating knowledge for students to memorise and later regurgitate is typically safer and distinctly easier than treating students as politically and culturally situated individuals with unique subjectivities, needs and sensibilities. As an alternative, student-centered discussion-based pedagogies can be eminently riskier— the teacher/student dynamic becomes less hierarchical, behavioral expectations are thus more nuanced, assessments and success criteria are often less objective. Despite this– perhaps because of this– dialogic pedagogies are far more felicitous, especially when it comes to SMSC, character and civic development.
It’s not that didactic methodologies are entirely superfluous. When it comes to conceptual and terminological scaffolding there is certainly a need for didactic teaching. Indeed, instruction is central to subjects such as Mathematics and the sciences. However, the humanities and social sciences necessitate a thoroughly dialogic pedagogy, since they deal with themes that are distinctly less objective.
For instance, we all know that in the UK maintained and independent schools are respectively statutorily obligated to conform with Sections 406-7 of the Education Act 1996 and Part 2 of the The Education (Independent School Standards) Regulations 2014. These detail that schools: (i) are prohibited from promoting partisan political views; and (ii) should take reasonable steps to ensure a balanced presentation of opposing views when exploring controversial and political issues (DfE, 2022). Quite understandably, this legislation might deter some teachers from discussing political or controversial issues with their students. Albeit, curricula are not– neither should they be– devoid of controversial themes, so they cannot be avoided entirely. Of course, they can be taught didactically insofar as one could defer to and/or instruct directly from the textbook. However, teachers must be mindful that education is never neutral and therefore ought to remain vigilant to any political motives or biases ingrained in specifications and textbooks; and it remains incumbent upon us to provide counterbalance where necessary. To this end, a risk-averse teacher whom feels safer educating within the confines of didactic praxes might simply present or dictate various lists of contraposing perspectives to their students. Though, this risks boring students to death whilst simultaneously undermining their autonomy as free-thinking persons. Therefore, beside the necessary conceptual and terminological scaffolding, didactic methodologies become largely inapplicable when teaching about subjective issues, whether or not they are controversial.
Dialogic pedagogies, on the other hand, can be a means to democratic socialization insofar as rigorous dialogue provides opportunities for students to share and explore ideas; to listen and critique the opinions of others, including those disseminated by their teachers. When so much of today’s media and public discourse is polarized and oversimplified, dialogic pedagogies can serve to elicit the shades of gray and gradually cultivate cultures wherein onto-epistemological diversity, expression and curiosity more easily thrive; wherein students can practice disagreeing agonistically rather than antagonistically (Underhill, 2019). Behemothic traditionalist educators who bear down on their students from the front of the room, who treat their students as passive apolitical receptacles, risk reinforcing oppressive social hierarchies; whereas those who engage their students in dialogue permit for those hierarchies to be acknowledged and critiqued. Needless to say, this is something that student-centered, liberal educators and institutions ought to embrace since critical free-thought and expression constitute the very bedrock of liberal democracy. In short, critical dialogic praxes are foundational to authentic democratic pedagogies. As Henry Giroux (2023: 16) puts:
“Critical pedagogy is the essential scaffolding of social interaction and the foundation of the public sphere. It is a crucial political practice because it takes seriously what it means to understand the relationship between how we learn and how we act as individuals and social agents; that is, it is concerned not only with how individuals learn to think critically but how they come to grips with a sense of individual and social responsibility”
It is important to note that dialogic teaching and learning can also be a means to improving general attainment. As Corbett and Strong (2011) note, “You cannot write it if you cannot say it – and you cannot say it unless you have heard it.” According to constructivist theories of learning, “knowledge is co-constructed through language, for example by sharing ideas, building on each others’ ideas, constructive discussion and questioning” (Drie and Dekker, 2013: 338). Further, discussion-based teaching and learning helps students develop their oracy skills. Consequently, students likely become more articulate, persuasive, tolerant, even patient. Not to mention, it can improve social confidence and, more importantly, the rapport between teachers and students since students are more likely to feel recognised and valued as participants in the learning process rather than mere recipients of it. This, in turn, makes it easier to cultivate a sense of community as well as school and classroom cultures conducive to high-quality academic learning, SMSC, character and civic development, as students become curious about other ways of knowing, seeing and being in the world.
It is worth noting too that the dialogic methodology creates possibilities for informal diagnostic and formative assessments. We can learn from Currie (2019: 92) here:
“When students speak, I try to listen not only to how they interpret a piece of writing, but to how they are learning. The more I really hear what students are really saying, the more I can revise my teaching.”
With that said, for teachers new to the dialogic approach there are a number of potential obstacles to overcome. As Beech (2023: 26) reports: teachers have lots of content to cover; they might have unwilling students; incapable students; overbearing voices; poor behavior; and potentially some naivety about how to appropriately promote talk in the classroom. However, the following strategies can help (Beech, 2023):
- Draw students’ attention to the value of expressing their thoughts and the protocols for doing so.
- Model thinking out loud.
- Plan questions that prompt thinking out loud.
- Gather responses in ways that promote talking for all.
- Respond to students’ answers.
- Praise thinking aloud.
It would be remiss of us teachers to leave much of students’ civic and character development to the ‘hidden curriculum’; to ignore the non-academic processes which play large in molding who they are, how they think, see and imagine. Yes, there is a place for didactic teaching but the dialogic approach is far more conducive to promoting general attainment, fostering criticality, autonomy and civic and moral responsibility, and thus can be said to be significantly democratising. Discussion-based teaching requires courage and determination on the part of educators to sacrifice short-term behavioral and performative goals for long-term, character-focused development and attainment goals. Teachers must be willing to step out of their comfort zones in order to create safer social and cognitive environments for their students. This is by no means easy. Nonetheless, how incredibly fulfilling it is to witness your students ‘disagreeing agreeably’ for the first time; to witness them rehearsing, honing, reframing, de-and-reconstructing issues, histories and arguments, all the while exploring who they are, why they are, and what they want to become through engaging in rigorous, critical, amicable, democratic classroom dialogue.
References
Beech H (2023) Promoting thinking out loud in the classroom, Impact: Journal of the chartered college of teaching, issue 19
Corbet P and Strong J (2011) Talk for Writing Across the Curriculum. Maidenhead: Open University Press
Currie J (2019) ‘Silence in the Classroom: From Reacting to Rapport’, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Vol.29, No. 1, pp.89-98
Dri and Dekker (2013) ‘Theoretical triangulation as an approach for revealing the complexity of a classroom discussion’. British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 39, No.2 April 2013, pp. 338-360
DfE (2022) ‘Political impartiality in schools’. Department for Education. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/political-impartiality-in-schools/political-impartiality-in-schools
Giroux H (2016) ‘Pedagogy against the Dead Zones of the Imagination’, Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Vol. 26. No. 12016. Pp.26-30
Giroux H (2023) Pedagogies of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance, Bloomsbury
Underhill H (2019) ‘Agonistic Possibilities for Global Unlearning: Constraints to Learning within Global Citizenship Education and Social Movements’. International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, Vol. 11, No. 2. https://doi.org/10.18546/IJDEGL.11.2.06.
Megapedagogy 
Leave a comment