The Nature of Dialogic Pedagogy: Understanding Discourse as Students’ Grasp of Science

• In Event: Complementary Approaches to Understanding Discourse as a Unified Linguistic, Social, and Cognitive Process

Abstract

Many educators argue that effective instruction involves introducing students to the grasp of scientific practice: understanding how scientists pose questions and seek answers to those questions through systematic investigation and discursive practices such as argumentation (Bricker & Bell, 2008; Ford, 2010). Instead of viewing science in its final, definitive form (i.e., facts and established theories), students need to learn that science is full of uncertainties and creative approaches to solving problems (McComas, 1996). This leads to the recommendation that we need to make classroom talk more like the talk of professional communities (Driver et al., 2000; Mortimer & Scott, 2003). Any change like this in classroom practices and norms can be difficult if teachers and students misunderstand and/or resist its instructional goals (e.g., Hogan & Corey, 2001).
One promising approach to conceptualizing and implementing this change in educational practice has been the notion of dialogic pedagogy (Mortimer & Scott, 2003; O’Connor & Michaels, 2007). One distinction that is often made in dialogic pedagogy is between the monologic speech of the typical classroom and the dialogic speech of the disciplines such as science. For example, the construction of explanations must anticipate the responses of critics. This distinction reminds educators of the similar contrast between “doing the lesson” and “doing science” (Bloome & Egan-Robertson,1989.; Jimenez-Aleixandre et al., 2000). However, this simple dualism has misled us into thinking that the shift from monologic to dialogic classroom talk must be sudden and complete if we want to achieve authentic engagement with the discipline of science.
More recent theorizing about dialogic pedagogy has questioned this simple dualism (Matusov, 2009) and found that when it is applied to classroom data, it does not represent the practices of expert teachers (Mortimer & Scott, 2003; O’Connor & Michaels, 2007). The aim of this paper is to articulate the recent argument about dialogic pedagogy and integrate it with my own view of the discourse that can support authentic scientific inquiry in classrooms (construction and critique under conditions of uncertainty). In my paper I will propose that support for learning to argue scientifically requires both monologic (authoritative) and dialogic aspects that change over the course of a lesson and/or curriculum unit (Morson, 2004). My argument will be illustrated using data from a 9-week high school curriculum that fostered scientific argumentation in evolutionary biology (Stewart, Cartier, & Passmore, 2005). I will identify ways the curriculum authoritatively supported students to participate holistically in disciplinarily dialogic construction and critique (Forman et al., 2010). This version of dialogic pedagogy also relied on students’ and teachers’ appreciation of the importance of uncertainty in science, unlike the certainty of more typical classroom talk.
These issues in science education will be discussed in a broader context in our working group roundtable as part of the inter-related nature of discursive, social, and cognitive processes across the curriculum.

Author

• Ellice A. Forman, University of Pittsburgh