Full Description
Solidly grounded in theory and empirical evidence, this book presents a novel methodological framework for fostering Communities of Dialogic Inquiry in primary education called Learning Together. These communities create collaborative networks of distributed cognition among school, university, and local community members to equip "apprentices" with a firm scientific foundation, complemented by a robust humanistic citizenship culture, enabling their participation in socioscientific practices in an informed, critical, responsible and inclusive fashion. Learning Together provides concrete, articulated, and richly illustrated teaching-learning strategies for cultivating these communities in diverse school and community settings.
"In this book, the authors make a distinctive, strong and important contribution to our understanding of how education can be made most productive. They draw on a wealth of schools-based research, including their own, to link what is known about the ways humans learn and what can and should happen in classrooms. It should help to promote a more accurate conception of education as a social, cultural, communicative activity, rather than a process whereby teachers simply transmit knowledge to students. I hope it is read by teachers, researchers and others involved in education everywhere". - Neil Mercer, Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Cambridge, UK
"For the authors of this fascinating and timely volume, communities of dialogic inquiry have two main aims: fostering skills that support a key human activity (learning for dialogue) and applying those skills in knowledge acquisition (learning through dialogue). The authors ground those aims in a novel yet convincing interpretation of sociocultural theory: the insightful and wide-ranging literature review that underpins their approach will be appreciated by researchers and practitioners alike. At the same time, the volume goes far beyond theory: it concludes with case studies, which indicate in detail how dialogic inquiry can be embedded in classrooms". - Christine Howe, Emeritus Professor, University of Cambridge, UK
Contents
Part I Sociocultural Perspectives on Learning and Development.- Chapter 1: The situated nature of human activity.- Chapter 2: Analysing human interaction in sociocultural contexts.- Chapter 3: Understanding and Enhancing Learning and Development.- Part II Dialogic Interactions and Multiliteracies as Social Practices.- Chapter 4: The significance of promoting dialogic interactions in educational contexts.- Chapter 5: Multiliteracies as dialogic meaning-making social practices.- Chapter 6: Promoting apprentices' participation in socioscientific practices through dialogic inquiry.- Part III Educational Implications: Cultivating Communities of Dialogic Inquiry.- Chapter 7: Learning Together: A methodological framework for cultivating Communities of Dialogic Inquiry.- Chapter 8: Putting it all into action: illustrating the implementation of Inquire in an educational setting.- Chapter 9: Enhancing dialogic inquiry in the context of implementing Inquire.- Chapter 10: Afterword: Origins of Learning Together and a reflection on its potential.
